Part Seven: The Preparation
My lawyer was a woman named Isabelle Fourcade, who had handled the legal formalization of my guardianship arrangement twelve years ago and who had, over the years, assisted with the business’s incorporation and growth. She was fifty-five and had the specific quality of someone who is very good at their work and does not find it necessary to perform how good they are.
I told her everything. She listened without interrupting, which was one of the things I valued about her. Then she asked questions — the specific, targeted questions of someone who is identifying what will matter in the proceeding.
She told me what we had, which was considerable: twelve years of documented care, a stable home, a financially secure environment, the strong preference of two children who were old enough for that preference to carry weight with a court. She told me what Claire had, which was a biological claim and the argument about my age, and the implicit suggestion that the business’s value made the family situation more complicated than it appeared.
“She wants the company,” Isabelle said. It was not a question.
“She told me so directly.”
Isabelle’s expression did not change, but she made a note. “That will be relevant,” she said. “If she made that request in your home, it speaks to motivation. Do you have any record of it?”
I thought about the kitchen. About the small device I had installed a year ago on the advice of my neighbor after a dispute with a contractor, a simple audio recorder that I kept on the kitchen shelf next to the tea canisters and that I had turned on when I saw the car at the gate, in the specific, instinctive way of a woman who has spent twelve years protecting what matters and has developed good instincts about when protection might be needed.
“Yes,” I said. “I have a recording.”
Isabelle looked at me for a moment. Then she smiled, briefly. “Good,” she said.
We prepared. I gathered twelve years of documentation — school records, medical records, the boys’ academic reports, the letters from their teachers, the photographs. I gathered the business records that demonstrated financial stability. Isabelle reviewed all of it and selected what would be presented.
I talked to the boys.
This was the conversation I had thought about most, before I had it. Hugo and Luc were twelve years old, and they were intelligent and perceptive and had navigated the specific experience of being children whose mother had left with the various strategies that children develop for managing things adults have caused and that they had not chosen. They had questions — they had always had questions, which I had always answered as honestly as the questions warranted. I had told them the truth in age-appropriate increments as they grew old enough for more of it.
They knew their mother had left. They had known, in the gradual way that children come to know things they were not specifically told, for years. They were twelve now, and they were old enough for the full truth, and I told them: Claire had come back, she had filed for custody, her stated motivation was financial, there would be a hearing, and their preferences would matter to the judge.
Hugo listened without speaking. Luc asked three questions, all of them sharp and specific. Then they both looked at me.
“What do you need us to do?” Luc asked.
“Nothing,” I said. “I need you to be honest with the judge if you’re asked. That’s all.”
Hugo nodded. He had the look of someone who has received information and is now doing something with it internally, in the private space where he processed things. I left them to it.
Two days before the hearing, Hugo came to find me in the shop. I was doing the morning inventory — the specific meditative task of counting and recording that I had done every morning for years and that I found useful for thinking. He stood in the doorway for a moment.
“Grand-mère,” he said. “Can I practice something with you?”
