And that woman never once, in nine years, said a single word against him to me.
Not a hint. Not a face across a table. Nothing I could have taken hold of and asked her about.
I have gone looking for one, since. There isn’t one.
She just went to a lawyer in Carrow in November of 2022, on her own, on a bus, without telling one person in this family —
and had that trust written the way she had it written.
An independent trustee. Not me. Not my husband. Not either of her own two daughters, and both of us were sitting in that lawyer’s office afterwards working out why.
A man named Abner Toft, who is sixty-eight and has been doing this for about forty families since 1991, and who I had never laid eyes on before April of this year —
and who has now sat at my kitchen table four times with a folder and a flask of his own coffee.
And a clause on page nine. One paragraph, four lines.
Odell Nance read it out loud to me twice in her office and then slid the page across the desk so I could read it myself.
If the beneficiary is determined by a court to be permanently incapacitated, the administration of that trust moves to the child’s parent or legal guardian, subject to the agreement of the trustee.
Subject to the agreement of the trustee.
Five words.
My mother paid a lawyer in Carrow four hundred dollars to put those five words into a document in November of 2022.
They are the only reason my daughter still has one cent of that money and they are the only reason I still have my daughter.
Because on the ninth of January this year — four months before any of this came apart — my husband filed a petition with the county.
A petition for a determination of incapacity and the appointment of a guardian of the estate of a minor.
Eleven pages. Filed electronically at 9:41 on a Thursday morning.
With a filing fee paid on a card I have never once seen a statement for in nine years of doing the household accounts.
For Mira Varga. His own daughter. Seven years old, second grade, reads above level.
Attached to that petition: eleven months of medical documentation.
Four hundred and some pages. I have seen the index. The index alone runs to three pages.
