Chapter 13 — A Trust Fund

I made myself read the document, slowly, past the legal language I half understood, and as I read, the terrifying shape of the thing began to resolve into something else entirely, something I could never in a thousand years have guessed.

It was not a threat.

It was not a lawsuit against me.

It was, as far as I could make out through the dense formal phrasing, about an inheritance.

The document referred to a large trust fund, an unassigned estate, that had been left behind by my late mother, and it described an effort, apparently six months long, by the law firm at the top of the letterhead to locate the rightful heir to that estate.