My father had a stroke and died in the ICU at Houston Methodist at six forty-seven on a Tuesday morning. I was holding his hand. Diane was in the waiting room on her phone calling his financial adviser.
In the week after the funeral, I learned three things.
First: my father had updated his will eighteen months before he died. He left the house to Diane, which was generous and probably foolish in retrospect, but that was who he was. The trust, roughly four-point-two million dollars in commercial property and investment accounts that my grandfather had assembled across five decades, he left entirely to me.
Second: Diane had known about this change for exactly four months, because she had gone through his desk while he was at a cardiology appointment and found the draft document. She had known since before his final hospitalization that the money was going to me, and she had spent those
