On my wedding night I hid under the bed to surprise my husband. His mother came in instead, sat down on the mattress above me, and put a call

I have kept that. It is the only thing anybody said to me that night that was any use.

The rest of it came from a woman called Imelda Raynott who has been doing estate litigation for twenty-six years and who read those receipts on a Tuesday morning and said, very quietly, oh, that’s interesting.

What she found is not complicated and that is the point of it.

An executor is allowed to pay the estate’s expenses. She is not allowed to lend it to one beneficiary, informally, for nine years, and record it as an expense.There are four properties. Two of them were sold in 2019 and 2021.

Saoirse was told the estate

was mostly the house and it’s complicated, and she was twenty when her father passed, and she believed her mother, and she signed what she was given at a kitchen table.