Chapter 9 - The Letter
Two months after Sarah and Greg left, a certified letter arrived in the mail.
It wasn't from Sarah. It was from a family law attorney downtown representing Greg, formalizing a request for “reconciliation assistance and dependent housing mediation.” According to the letter, they were threatening to file a civil suit claiming that my abrupt revocation of financial support constituted elder abandonment and intentional infliction of emotional distress.
I chuckled out loud as I read the letter sitting at my kitchen table. Greg had always been a master of finding someone else to blame for his catastrophic life choices, and apparently unemployment had only sharpened his talent for legal fiction.
Instead of panicking the way I would have two months ago, I simply folded the letter, placed it into the manila folder containing Robert’s trust documents, and drove downtown to our family attorney’s office.
Attorney Miller, an elderly, sharp-eyed man who had helped Robert draft the original trust two decades ago, looked over Greg’s lawyer’s letter with a look of profound amusement.
“Eleanor,” Attorney Miller said, removing his half-moon reading glasses and leaning back in his leather chair. “Do you want me to send a formal response, or should I simply mail them a copy of the irrevocable family trust clause regarding fraudulent dependency?”
“Send them the trust clause, Arthur,” I said calmly. “Let them know that if they file a single paper in civil court, we will counter-file for financial fraud, property damage, and the recovery of over forty thousand dollars in unauthorized expenses charged to my credit cards over the past twenty-four months.”
Arthur Miller smiled broadly. “Consider it done. I haven't seen a frivolous claim fold that fast since the nineties.”
True to his word, our lawyer’s response was dispatched by courier that very afternoon. Within forty-eight hours, we received an email from Greg’s attorney stating that their clients had “decided to pursue alternative housing solutions and would not be proceeding with further legal action.”
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Translation: Greg realized that looking at my bank statements in front of a judge would result in him getting arrested rather than getting a paycheck.
I never heard from Sarah directly again—not through text, not through email, not through mutual acquaintances who suddenly found themselves uncomfortable getting caught in the middle of our family fallout. And for the first time in my life, the absence of their chaos felt like the greatest gift I could have ever given myself.
