She was thoughtful about this. She said it varied enormously. She’d seen situations where a lot of damage was done because no one asked the right questions at the right time. She’d seen situations where the formal process caught everything and the estate was administered correctly regardless of what any family member had tried to do. She’d seen situations where the truth came out but the family never recovered from the process of its coming out.
“What determines which kind it is?” I said.
“Whether someone asks,” she said. “And how quickly. And whether the formal process is invoked before informal agreements can calcify into facts.”
I thought about this. About sitting in the living room and counting the page numbers. About the pause before Vanessa handed me the document. About the hotel room and the state bar directory and the email I’d sent that night.
“What if I’d signed the waiver?” I said.
“Then we’d be having a different conversation,” she said. “Or not having one.”
“The process would have run on what Vanessa presented.”
“Possibly,” she said. “There are safeguards — the formal probate process, the professional’s ethical obligations, beneficiary rights. But those safeguards work better when someone invokes them. The fact that you asked is why the process worked the way it was supposed to.”
I sat with that. It was not comfortable. It implied that the outcome had not been inevitable, which meant there had been a version of the week in which a different Tuesday night had led somewhere else.