Beatrice requested mediation rather than a full courtroom battle, three months into the process, once it became clear how thoroughly documented Adeline’s intentions actually were.
I agreed to it, mostly because I didn’t have the emotional bandwidth left for a drawn-out trial, and partly because some small, curious part of me wanted to finally meet the aunt Adeline had rarely spoken about, except in the careful, clipped tone people use for family members they’ve decided not to waste more energy explaining.
Beatrice arrived at the mediation office in a coat that looked more suited to a boardroom than a conversation about her late niece, flanked by her own attorney, her expression unreadable in the specific way I imagined she’d practiced for exactly this kind of meeting.
“I loved Adeline,” she said, early in the session, in a tone that made the sentence sound more like an opening argument than a confession.
“I believe you loved the version of her that didn’t require anything difficult from you,” I said. “I sat beside her through two years of appointments, Beatrice. I don’t remember seeing you at a single one.”
Her attorney started to interject. Beatrice held up a hand, stopping him.
“You’re not wrong,” she said quietly, after a long moment. “I didn’t know how to be around her once she got sick. It was easier to stay away and tell myself I was respecting her privacy than admit I simply didn’t know how to sit in a room with that much fear.”
It wasn’t quite an apology. It was closer to an honest sentence than anything else she’d said since walking in, though, and for reasons I didn’t fully examine at the time, that mattered more to me than I expected.
The mediation ended with Beatrice withdrawing her formal challenge to the marriage, in exchange for a modest, separate distribution from a smaller family account that had nothing to do with Constance’s original trust — money Mr. Whitcomb assured me was entirely hers to have anyway, once the lawyers stopped complicating things for the sake of complicating them.
