The next morning, Grandma and I met Mr. Grant at his office. There were no dramatic speeches waiting for us there, no shouting, no cameras. Just documents. Lots of them, spread carefully across a long conference table.
The independent trustee, a measured man named Walter Kim, sat at the end of the table and explained that the trust would be reviewed immediately, that his role from this point forward was strictly administrative, following the terms Grandpa had laid out twelve years earlier with a precision that clearly hadn’t anticipated needing to be used this thoroughly.
Grandma listened carefully to everything he said. Then she asked the question I knew had been weighing on her since the airport.
“Will they go to prison?”
The trustee looked toward Mr. Grant. Mr. Grant answered, his voice even. “That depends on what the investigation finds.”
Grandma nodded, unsmiling. She wasn’t celebrating anything. She simply looked tired, the particular exhaustion of a woman who has spent seventy-nine years building a family only to spend the last several months discovering how much of it had been built on assumptions that weren’t holding weight anymore.
