And I worked. I did the books for a landscaping firm and a garage from that kitchen table until I was thirty-eight weeks, because I was not going to touch a penny of the trust while a divorce was live and because Ines told me, in exactly these words: “Take nothing you’d have to explain.”
It was the loneliest eight months of my life and it was the correct eight months, and both of those are true and I do not rank them.
My grandmother.
Hester Halliday was eighty-six when she died in the August of 2024. She ran a plant hire business in Brightwater for forty-one years and she did her own books until she was eighty.
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.
