She left me two point one million and a house.
And she left it in a way I did not understand until this year, and which is the whole of this story.
All of it — the house, the investments, everything — went into a discretionary trust set up in the November of 2022, with her solicitor Ines Talbot and my aunt as trustees, and me as the beneficiary.
Not to me. Into a trust. Which a husband cannot reach, which a divorce court treats very differently, and out of which nobody can move a penny without two signatures, neither of them mine.
And separately — and this is the part — in the January of 2023 she opened a current account at a different bank, in her own name, put sixty-one thousand into it, and told exactly two people it existed.
One was Ines Talbot.
The other was Ellis Prentiss. At a Sunday lunch. In passing. As though she had had a sherry and gone loose-tongued about her granddaughter’s inheritance.
