My father had known both of these things about us, I think. That’s what the amendment suggests to me: not that I was his favorite, not that Vanessa had failed him, but that he saw a specific thing that he’d caused or contributed to and he wanted to address it. In the way he knew how.
I wish he’d had the conversation. I think he was scared to.
## What I Asked For
I want to be clear about something, because it matters to me and because I’ve had to say it several times now: I didn’t pursue this to maximize what I received.
The sixty thousand dollars was not nothing. It was real and it was meaningful and it would have made a difference one way or the other in my life. But when I was sitting in that hotel room on a Tuesday night, looking up probate attorneys, the thing that was driving me was not the money.
It was the page. It was the fact that my father had added a page, had put something in writing, had taken the trouble to go through a professional and make it formal, and then that page had not appeared in the document that was read to our family. What had happened in that living room — whatever the degree of Vanessa’s awareness or intention — had erased, for that evening, the thing my father had done. Everyone in that room had been given a version of his wishes that didn’t include me, and they had believed it, and without me counting the page numbers it might have stayed believed.