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“So, before I have you start, I have to ask. Are you coming to me to talk as a friend or as a lawyer?”
“Kind of both,” he said, somewhat sheepishly. “I don’t really know who else to go to, and this is a family law situation. But I trust you because you’re my friend.”
“Okay,” I said. “I will try to give you advice as a friend, but unless you actually hire me, don’t take anything I say as absolutes, okay?”
“Got it,” he said. “Sorry, I don’t mean to put you on the spot.”
“No, it’s okay,” I said. “Really.”
“I just don’t want you to feel like I am taking advantage of you,” he said.
There was an honesty to that, and I felt like in that moment, if I had said I was uncomfortable, he would have walked out and not held it against me. It wouldn’t change anything. Except he would still need help.
“Not at all,” I said. “Continue.”
He sighed, reaching up to unbutton the top button of his dress shirt before leaning back in the seat. I had to control the warm flush that went through me at the sudden reveal of the top of his chest, looking away to my coffee for a moment as I gathered myself.
“So, my father died,” he began, “and in his will, he left me the clinic with the hopes that I would run it. But it was more than that. He owns the building, as did my grandfather before him. There’s been a Doc Murphy around these parts for over sixty years. But Dad had a sister. They weren’t particularly close since his sister was much younger than he was, and when Dad was taking over the business, she went and got married and had nothing to do with it.
“Anyway, so she barely ever comes around, no one hears from her for years, and she doesn’t even come to the funeral, right? She only sent flowers. I thought it was just how she was coping with all of it, but it turns out she hired a lawyer that day.”
“The day of the funeral?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said.
“That’s interesting,” I said. “And cold.”
“Very,” he said. “Dad had asked me when he was in hospice to take over the business for him. Have another generation of Dr. Murphys. And I promised him that, even though I had my own life and my own thing going on. I told him I would come back and run it for him.
“If I’m being honest, I wasn’t sure I would stay. I just knew that I was going to fulfill my duty and come down here and run it for a while and see how I felt. And if I needed to later on, I would hand off running it to someone else and I would move back. But then last night I get a text from Dad’s lawyer in Dallas. Apparently, my aunt is contesting the will. She wants half the business and the whole building or the whole business and half the building, claiming it was left to both her and Dad when Grandpa passed.”
“Is that true?” I asked, reaching over to my yellow notepad and jotting down notes, as I never had one far from me, and in fact, I had one on each coffee table in this room.
“Apparently, yes. But the tricky part is that it was contingent on having some sort of working stake in the business before either could inherit it. Dad clearly ran the place, and my aunt had no interest in any of it. She’s claiming she was pushed out by Dad, but I can’t find any record of her even stepping foot in the place to work. Not even to answer phones or file charts.”
“Well,” I said. “I can see how you would be frustrated and upset. I have a feeling that was a bit of a short version of everything. We have some time. Why don’t you start at the top again and go through it slowly?”
He seemed confused but nodded and did so. It was a tactic that I used quite often for complicated cases. People tended to give shortened versions of their problems to hit what they considered relevant points. The problem was they weren’t lawyers. They didn’t know all the things that could be considered relevant. That was my job and getting them to go over it slowly for the third or fourth time often had the effect of unraveling pieces of information that they assumed was either inconsequential or intuitive because they lived it.
After he was done explaining it again, I felt like I had a better handle on the information and had it all written down for the purpose of pouring over it later.
“So, what should I do?” he asked.
I hated that he was going through this. Mark was such a good man, and though I was trying to talk him through it, the fact of the matter was it wasn’t cut and dry. His aunt did have a valid enough claim that was probably going to have to be settled in court. It wasn’t going to be as simple as him showing the will to a judge and it all going away, either. It might be a fight.
