That was what my father wrote. Or what he told Mara Chen to write, which amounted to the same thing.
I sat in the small conference room where I’d been given the document to review, and I cried in the specific way that you cry when something is both a loss and a confirmation. He had valued it. He had valued the Sunday calls and the late-night conversations and the inexplicable fern photograph. He had not said so in the way I would have wanted. He had said it in a will amendment, through a lawyer, in the specific language of estates, which was the language he was most comfortable with at the end.
After the sixty thousand dollar bequest, the remaining estate was to be divided equally between his two daughters after legitimate expenses, which — per Patricia Rourke’s later explanation of the accounting — meant that Vanessa and I would each receive approximately one hundred forty thousand from the remainder, give or take, after the house sold and the fees were settled. The numbers were estimates until the final accounting. They stayed estimates for months.
The letter of the document was clear. The executor had the obligation to administer it as written.
## What Vanessa Did Next
Vanessa did not, to my knowledge, produce a different version of the will during the formal process. She did not, as far as I could determine, instruct Mara Chen to change anything or represent the document differently to the court. The formal process ran on the executed instrument.