When Judge Elden Marwick looked down at my coffee-stained apron, asking if my ‘genius brain’ could count beyond ten, and let my parents laugh as if they were already burying me, he didn’t know that the woman they were mocking had a tape recorder in her pocket, a Harvard law degree in her briefcase, and a grandmother who had prepared a final trap specifically for rooms like this.

A will, I realized, is not just a financial instrument. It is the last uninterrupted sentence a person gets to speak into a family system that has probably spent years talking over them. I became obsessed with fiduciary duty, undue influence, capacity, and the psychology of inheritance.

In ethics seminars I watched case after case in which wealth was mistaken for virtue and poverty was mistaken for instability. I took notes thinking of my parents the entire time. During my second summer, while classmates chased prestige in Manhattan and D.C., I interned at a legal collective in Boston that handled estate disputes for people who could not afford the polished sharks.

There I learned a brutal truth: greed does not scale. A family fighting over five thousand dollars will show you the same raw desperation as a family fighting over five million. Only the tailoring changes.

It was that summer, back in Vermont helping Eleanor with her office files, that I found the transfers. Consulting fee: C. Henshaw.