I want to be honest that I assumed the same thing. Nobody had ever told me otherwise. Nobody had ever needed to, until the year everything came apart.
Twelve years before the airport, back when Grandpa was still alive and healthy enough to be thinking carefully about the future rather than reacting to an emergency, he and Grandma had sat down with an estate attorney named Elias Grant and built something my father never fully understood the shape of, a
family trust that held the building, that held a significant portion of Grandma’s assets, and that came with conditions attached, conditions Mr. Grant had explained plainly to both my father and my Aunt Monica at the time. Grandma’s assets were protected. Any beneficiary who deceived her, pressured her, or financially exploited her could be removed from the trust entirely, permanently, with no appeal.
My father hated Elias Grant from that day forward, the particular, resentful hatred you reserve for someone who has correctly identified something about you that you’d rather nobody ever say out loud. I didn’t understand that hatred at the time. I understood it completely, twelve years later, standing in an airport terminal watching my father’s face go through every stage of a controlled collapse.
