I didn’t sleep well that night. I sat at the kitchen table where Diane and I used to have our morning coffee. I thought about Noah’s gray-blue eyes, and the way he said “Grandpa Walter,” with the emphasis on the Walter, like my name was the most interesting word he knew. I thought about Diane saying the universe had given him to us as a gift on the way out.
I thought about $60,000 going into a house that now had a sign-in sheet for family visits. And then I thought about a conversation I’d had, about six months earlier, with my neighbor Patricia, whose son had gone through a difficult divorce. She’d mentioned a lawyer, a family law attorney in Hamilton named Reginald Forsythe. Patricia described him as patient and precise, and not the kind of man who gets loud when things get complicated.
I’d taken his card to be polite. It was still in the drawer, with the takeout menus and the spare keys. I took it out that night. I called Reginald Forsythe the next morning.
His assistant put me through within the hour, and I spent 45 minutes on the phone explaining the situation as clearly and calmly as I could. Reginald listened without interrupting. When I finished, he was quiet for a moment. “Mr. Brandt, I want you to do a few things before we talk next,” he said.
“I want you to save every email, every text, and every document Vanessa has sent you. I want you to write down, with dates, every visit that was canceled or restricted. And I want you to have a conversation with your accountant about the $60,000.” I asked him why the accountant.
“Because,” he said, “gifts given to family members are not always treated the same way under family law, depending on how they were given and documented. And I’d like to understand exactly what financial relationship exists between you and your son’s household.” I had used the same accountant for 20 years. Sandra Obi was a meticulous woman who had done my taxes since I was still at the city.
She kept files the way a librarian keeps books: organized, cross-referenced, and permanent. I called her the same afternoon. I told her what had happened and asked her to pull everything related to the $60,000. I needed bank transfers, correspondence, and any documentation of the gift.
What Sandra found was something I hadn’t fully processed at the time. The $60,000 I’d given Michael and Vanessa hadn’t just gone toward the down payment on the Oakville house. Sandra showed me bank records and a chain of transfers I hadn’t seen clearly before. A portion of the money had moved through their joint account and into a separate account in Vanessa’s name alone, about 18 months after I’d given them the funds.
The account had been opened shortly after their purchase. The transfers were small enough to avoid easy notice. Roughly $22,000, over the course of about 14 months, had been quietly moved into an account Michael didn’t appear to know about. I sat in Sandra’s office for a long time after she told me this.