What she did do was call Aunt June and tell her that she had genuinely not known about the amendment. That she’d had an old copy and had been as surprised as anyone by the discrepancy. That Hannah had overreacted and made a private family matter into a formal legal proceeding.
Aunt June told me this matter-of-factly, without editorializing. I appreciated that.
“Do you believe her?” I asked Aunt June. “That she didn’t know?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I think she knew something was off about that page. I think she might have convinced herself she didn’t know anything specific. People can do that.”
“They can,” I agreed.
“The waiver,” June said. “That’s the thing I can’t quite explain away. If she genuinely just had an old copy she didn’t know was incomplete, why draft something for us to sign saying we agreed with the distribution as presented?”
“Yeah,” I said.
“She says that was just her being organized. That she’d read about estate disputes and wanted to prevent one.”
“By asking beneficiaries to agree to a distribution before they’d seen the complete will,” I said.
“That’s what I can’t explain away,” she said again.
I didn’t pursue this further, formally or informally. I didn’t know what Vanessa had known or hadn’t known, not with the certainty I’d need to do anything with it. What I knew was that the executed will was complete and that the formal process was administering it as written. Whether Vanessa’s withholding was deliberate or was a mistake she’d rationalized into something she could live with — I didn’t know. I wasn’t sure I’d ever know.