I want to be honest about that too. He did not go and sit next to her. He went outside and stood by his car for about twenty minutes and then he came back in for the burial.
He is forty-four years old and he has not yet been able to say the words out loud. He wrote her a letter in September. She wrote back. That’s where that is.
I went and sat next to her.
I did not say anything for a while because there was nothing available that wasn’t an insult.
Eventually I said, “Six and a half years.”
And she said, “He asked me not to.”
And I said, “That’s not a good enough reason.”
And Seraphine Ellery turned and looked at me for the first time in six and a half years — really looked at me, I mean, straight on — and she said:
“It was to me.”
Some things about after.
The prenuptial agreement is real and it is exactly as he described it and I have read it four times. Prue Vandenberg had it in a file with a note on the front in my father’s handwriting.
The trust accounts are real. Three hundred and eighty-one thousand dollars of the Vireo Lake sale went into home care between October 2021 and May 2025. Every invoice is in there. Night nursing three nights a week from March 2023, which is when she stopped being able to do the nights alone.
She was on her own with him the other four.
The estate is mine and Lucan’s. All of it. That’s what the document says and neither of us has any legal ability to change it, which I looked into in July.
What we did instead, in August, took about six weeks and a lot of argument.
Lucan wanted to give her a third. I wanted to give her half. We landed on forty percent and she refused it three times and then Prue Vandenberg, who is seventy-three and has no patience left, told her to stop being ridiculous in front of both of us.
She took it in October. She is buying a small place two towns over. She wants a garden.
