Then Her Brother Rang and Said She Should Have More Than a Third

The estate was now worth about fifty-seven thousand pounds rather than twenty-six.

Aoife did the sums on the back of a bank statement at her own kitchen table and felt, mostly, relief — not about the money, but because a number that had been faintly humiliating had become a number that sounded like a life’s work.

She sent both of them a summary that evening, with the auction house’s fees itemised, because she had decided in week one that every single thing she did would be written down.

Marcus rang the next day.

---

He was awkward about it in a way that told her immediately that he had rehearsed.

“So I’ve been thinking,” he said. “About the split.”

“It’s a third each. It’s in the will.”

“I know what the will says.”

“Then it’s a third.”

“Aoife.” He took a run at it. “Will you let me get to the end of a sentence?”

---

“You did eleven years,” he said. “I came at Christmas. I came at Christmas and I was there for four hours and I complained about the drive. Jen came twice in nineteen years, and before you defend her, she’s said the same thing to me and she said it first.”

“He was my dad as well—”

“He was all our dad. You’re the one who did it.” Marcus’s voice had gone slightly odd. “If you want to know what I actually think, I think a third is embarrassing. I’ve thought that for about three years and I’ve never said it because there was nothing to say it about. Now there’s thirty-one thousand pounds on the table that only exists because you rang us, and I’m not sitting here taking a third of it.”

“Marcus—”

“I’ve spoken to Jen. She thinks the same. We’d both like you to take half.”

---

Aoife said no.

She said no on that call, and she said no the following week, and she said no in an email in the middle of October that she spent two evenings on, and she went on saying no for six weeks.

---

There were two reasons, and only one of them was creditable.

The creditable one: taking it would have felt like being paid for looking after her father. That is the sentence she used at the time and it is the one people find easy to understand and nod at. She had not done eleven years in order to be compensated for eleven years. The moment there was a price on it, something about the eleven years changed, and she could not work out what and did not want to find out.

The other reason, which took her longer to admit and which she only said out loud once, to her husband, at about one in the morning: she suspected that some of the offer was guilt looking for somewhere to go.

And she did not want to be the place it went.

“If they give me an extra eight grand,” she said, “then they’ve dealt with it. Then it’s done. Then nobody ever has to say the actual thing.”

“What’s the actual thing?”

“That I did it on my own,” said Aoife, “and everybody let me.”

---

Marcus, to his credit, did not push.

He asked once more in November and then stopped, and said, “The offer doesn’t expire,” and left it, which was exactly right and which Aoife did not expect from him.

It was Jen who finished it.

---

She rang on a Sunday in December, from Dublin, and did not build up to it at all.

“Are you still saying no?”

“Yes.”

“Right,” said Jen. “Can I say one thing and then I’ll leave it?”

“Go on.”

“It’s not payment,” said Jen. “I know that’s what it feels like and I know you’d hate it if it was. It isn’t. It’s us admitting what happened.”

Aoife did not say anything.

“Because if you make us split it evenly,” Jen said, “then we all get to keep pretending it was even. And it wasn’t even. It was eleven years and it was you, and if we go three ways then in ten years’ time that’s just what happened, and nobody ever has to look at it.”

---

There was a long pause on the line.

“That’s unfair,” said Aoife.

“Yes,” said Jen. “It’s also true. Both those things.”

---

Aoife rang her back on the Wednesday and said yes.

Not to half. That was her one condition, and it took another week of small negotiation, and she has since been told by a solicitor that families argue for years over less.

She took twenty-two thousand. The other two took seventeen and a half each.

All three of them agreed it was the fairest available answer, and none of them entirely liked it, which Aoife’s husband says is probably the mark of a decent settlement.