That is the surcharge figure, and it is the number that went on the petition, and I read it for the first time standing up in a lawyer’s office in Denver on the eleventh of February 2025.

Part Thirty: Why Nineteen

I asked Imogen why my grandfather had written nineteen.

Trusts terminate at twenty-one, or twenty-five, or in staged thirds at twenty-five and thirty and thirty-five, which is what a careful lawyer recommends, because nineteen-year-olds are nineteen.

Nineteen is not a normal age to put in a trust and she said she had never seen it once in twenty-two years.

The answer is in the drafting file at Hale & Vance, which they produced along with everything else, and it is a handwritten attendance note dated the second of November 1994, made by a lawyer called Pettingill who is now dead.