The attorney’s name was Marcus Webb, fifty years in estate law, the kind of man whose office contained more filed secrets than most government archives, and he delivered the news about the third clause with the expression of someone who had been in this profession long enough to be unsurprised by anything and was today, fractionally, surprised.
The third clause had been embedded in a subsection of the original estate instrument under a heading so broadly worded that three separate reviews had passed over it without triggering concern. It had been drafted, Webb explained, with the specific intention of remaining dormant until activated by a set of conditions that had now been met.
The conditions were: the marriage validated, the inheritance transferred, the second clause invalidated.
All
