Would You Like a Rose

Chapter 11 - The Legal Picture

Teresa Reyes, the estate attorney James Ellery recommended for Clara's representation, was a careful, precise woman in her late forties who had built her practice specifically around contested inheritance matters, which meant she was excellent at explaining extremely complex situations in language that contained no unnecessary optimism and no unnecessary despair.

She met with Victoria and Clara together at James's office two weeks after the dinner, which both women had decided was the correct arrangement, the kind of thing that would take twice as long and produce twice the confusion if done separately.

"The core question," Teresa said, after she'd spent forty minutes laying out the legal landscape in meticulous sequence, "is whether Catherine Rosewood's original adoption arrangement constituted a legal severance of Margaret's inheritance rights, or whether it was a private arrangement that never actually terminated those rights under the law as it stood in 1948."

"What does the law as it stood in 1948 say," Victoria asked.

"It says, unfortunately, several different things depending on which jurisdiction and which specific statutory framework is applied," Teresa said, with the particular equanimity of someone who has delivered this answer many times. "But the cleanest reading, supported by the most recent case law in comparable matters, is that an informal private arrangement of the kind Catherine made, without proper probate court involvement, did not legally sever Margaret's inheritance rights."

"Which means," Clara said.

"Which means that Margaret Rosewood's descendants may have a legitimate claim on a portion of the Rosewood estate as originally structured," Teresa confirmed. "The key variables are the estate's current composition, the extent to which those assets can be traced back to the original Rosewood inheritance rather than to additions made since, and the specifics of Catherine's will, which named both daughters explicitly but was apparently never properly executed."

"How much of the current estate is traceable to the original Rosewood holdings," Victoria asked.

James consulted the files he'd assembled. "Approximately sixty percent. The remainder represents growth, investment returns, and additions made by Eleanor after Catherine's death."

"So Clara's potential claim is against sixty percent of the estate," Victoria said.

"Potentially against her proportional share of that sixty percent," Teresa said. "Which, as a co-equal heir, would be half. So approximately thirty percent of the total estate's current value."

The number that hung in the room after this was considerable.

Clara sat with it for a moment, and Victoria watched her sister's face navigate the specific, complicated territory of being told that the amount of money she was potentially owed was more than she would have earned in several lifetimes at the job she'd held before Daniel died.

"I want to make one thing clear," Victoria said. "I'm not contesting any of this. Whatever the law determines Clara is owed, I want it resolved in her favor as quickly and as completely as possible. This is not an adversarial proceeding from my perspective."

Teresa nodded, but added carefully: "Nicholas Harland may not share that perspective. The marital estate's composition could complicate matters depending on how the separation proceeds."

"Nicholas's attorneys will be dealing with my attorneys about the marriage," Victoria said. "And then my attorneys will be dealing with your attorneys about the estate. I'd like those to be separate processes."

"That's considerably simpler if the separation is agreed and not contested," Teresa said.

"Nicholas has every reason to make this simple," Victoria said, with the specific, quiet certainty of a woman who understood exactly what documentation James had received from Nicholas's attorney the previous week and what legal vulnerability it represented for her husband. "He'll make it simple."

Clara, who had been listening to all of this with the expression of someone watching an expert perform a very complex procedure she herself wouldn't attempt, reached over and touched Victoria's arm briefly.