Calgary, May 2024
Some people say I am a messy person. At least my wife says so. “How you could be a lawyer when you are always losing papers?” she keeps asking. It is true, at home my desk looks chaotic and sometimes something gets lost, but home and office are two different things. At work, I know exactly where everything is and never waste time looking for lost documents. I am a good lawyer. But one evening, when I was at home cleaning my messy desk, I found something unexpected. In the bottom drawer, there was an unopened envelope addressed to me. I must have put it there some time ago and forgot about it. The letter in the envelope was brief and to the point:
Dear brother Dave.
I don’t know if this letter will reach you, our father specified your name and address in his testimony. I even didn’t know I had a brother. Anyway, our father died recently and left us an inheritance, half to you and half to me. My lawyer said if you don't respond within a reasonable time, the whole inheritance will be assigned to me. Therefore, if you read this, please get in touch with me.
Your brother Mark.
There was the address, telephone number and the date. The letter was sent two years ago.
This was a big surprise for me, I didn’t know I had a brother. My mom never mentioned him. She told me my father died when I was a baby, and he left us enough money to have a normal life. That’s why I was able to study and become a lawyer. But obviously, my mom didn’t tell me the truth. It would be logical to confront her with the letter, but first I wanted to talk to my recently discovered brother. Therefore, the next day I called his number and left a message on the answering machine. The reply came within minutes.
“Hello Dave,” said a deep male voice. “So, you got my letter after all.”
“Yes, I did, but I lost it. Yesterday, by chance, I found it among old papers and discovered I have a brother. I didn’t know about you.”
“I didn’t know about you either, I only found out from the testimony. Our father must have had some secrets.”
“How was our father?”
“He was nice to us; we were a happy family. He was also a good businessman, the inheritance he left was substantial."
“Speaking about the inheritance, I presume you got it all.”
“Yes. Are you planning to fight over it?”
"No, not at all. I am a lawyer dealing with family disputes and I know how ugly it can get. I don't want anything like that to happen to us.”
“So, what do you propose?”
"I would like to meet with you, discuss it calmly, and come up with a mutually acceptable agreement."
"From a lawyer, this sounds very reasonable.”
“OK. I can drive to your city and meet you at work. Then we go to a restaurant to talk. But I have a question: Are you married?”
“Yes.”
“Me too, and I suggest we leave our wives out of this. When women are involved, it is always more difficult to come to an agreement.”
Mark agreed, we exchanged a few e-mails to arrange the meeting and I told my wife that a customer wanted to see me. Then, after a short drive, I met my brother at his work. He was working for one of those high-tech companies and judging from his office, he was doing all right.
“Hello brother, you have a nice office,” I greeted him.
“It was my dad’s office and now I took over.”
“You own the company?”
“I run it and I am the major shareholder.”
He smiled and we shook hands. He was perhaps a little older than me but there were obvious signs of similarity between us. We were definitively brothers, and it felt strange to see him for the first time. I always wanted to have a sibling, but now I was afraid. We had tense negotiations ahead of us.
“When we talked on the phone, you said you don’t want to fight over the inheritance. You prefer an agreement. Is this still true?” was Mark’s first question.
“Yes, it is.”
“So, what do you have in mind?”
“You give me some money, we will sign an agreement, will get it certified to avoid future disputes, and that will be it.”
“How much money do you want?”
“How much are you prepared to give me?”
This, obviously, was the crunch of the negotiation. We mentioned some numbers, and I was pleased to notice that Mark was not greedy. But, when we came to what I call a mutually agreeable settlement, Mark pointed out a problem.
“If I give you that much money, I cannot keep it secret from my wife. I will have to give her an explanation, but you don’t want to involve our women.”
That was true, but I am a lawyer, and situations like that are nothing new to me.
“You are right, you must explain it to your wife. But you don’t have to lie to her, just bend the truth slightly. You can say that our dad owed money to his business partner and the money must be paid now. After all, my mom offered him a service and he owed her something. For my part, I will tell my wife I got a bonus from work.”
This concluded our surprisingly friendly encounter. We made an appointment with a lawyer, signed the agreement and Mark transferred the money to my account.
“Do you want us to keep in contact?” he asked when we were done. I liked Mark and always wanted to have a brother. “Yes, I would like to.”
“But how do we explain our encounter to our wives? If we keep in contact, I don't want to conceal from them that we are brothers. Besides, it is obvious from our appearance.”
“You can say you found a letter from your dad which mentioned me. You then sent me another letter like the one two years ago, minus the inheritance part. I will show it to my wife and we all can meet. Family reunion after thirty years.”
All went according to the plan, and about two weeks later four of us had a pleasant dinner. We toasted to the lost brothers, to the new-founded family, and to a friendship forever. I was happy but was also curious about what have happened between my mum and my dad. He obviously didn’t die, as my mom told me. Therefore, one evening I visited her with Mark’s letter in hand. “Will you tell me what really happened? The truth?”
She read the letter several times. “He was a good man, I loved him. I knew he had family, and I wasn’t so naïve to think he would leave them for me, but I still loved him. He had some business here and I was a waitress in the restaurant he patronized. He was lonely, was generous with me and what happened, happened. He had frequent trips here and we saw each other often. Then, when I told him I was pregnant, he said we must stop seeing each other, but he promised to support me financially, which he did. He must have been quite rich. We kept in contact, and after you were born, I sent him your photos. He was always interested in you and was happy when you graduated as a lawyer. I was sad when he died.”
“Why didn’t you tell me all that before?”
“Because I was afraid you might think I was a prostitute. That I was with him only for money.”
“And were you?”
“At the beginning yes, but then no.”
Being a lawyer taught me not to judge people, and I certainly didn't judge my mom. But I had another question: “You said he was rich and had a business here. What kind of business?”
“He owned a company. I think it was called ...”, and she told me the name
This was the name of Mark’s family business and I wondered how it became so successful. After all, there is always a lot of competition.
Google search indicated the company offers GPS tracking systems for businesses with a fleet of vehicles, for example, a taxi service. Each vehicle is equipped with a GPS receiver and transmits the vehicle’s position to the dispatcher's computer. When a customer needs a taxi, the dispatcher calls the driver closest to the customer. This was one of the earliest GPS applications, and Mark’s dad deserves the credit for developing it. But surely, he wasn’t alone. There were others, as I found out. For example, Google mentioned a newspaper article claiming that the founder of Mark's company plagiarised the idea published by somebody else. However, the complainer was a PhD student who published the idea in his thesis, and he never pursued his claim any further. But my lawyer’s instinct told me there might be more to it than just a newspaper article. I got the name of the author of the thesis and contacted him. By now he was a respected scientist in another high-tech firm and didn’t want to talk to me about the past. “It happened a long time ago and I already forgot about it,” he said. But when I assured him that I just wanted to know what happened and nothing else, he agreed to meet me.
“As I said, it happened a long time ago," he began. “I was finishing my PhD and Dr. Thomas Williams, the one who stole my thesis, was my supervisor. We discussed the idea, he liked it, approved my thesis, and I defended it. That was the end of my studies, I got a job, and I started my working career. Sometime later, while reading a list of successful start-ups, what do I see? My former prof is running a company based on my thesis. I tried to contact him, but there was no response, so I wrote this article to the local newspapers. But nothing happened and I left it at that. I didn’t want to fight my former prof.”
“Why not? You might have received some compensation.”
“I am not that much after money, and I don’t like making enemies. I wouldn’t be worth it.”
"You are right, it wouldn't be worth it,” I agreed as we parted.
I don’t know why I decided to tell Mark what I have found out. Perhaps I wanted to show him how clever I was. In any case, one day during the family picnic I took a bottle of wine, two glasses and asked Mark to follow me to the far corner of the garden. There was a picnic table and we sat down.
“What are we celebrating?” he asked.
“I want to show you something,” and I showed him the newspaper article.
He read it carefully and said: “I hoped this secret would never leave the family.”
“It is not leaving it. We are the family, I am your brother.”
He looked at me and smiled. "To the family," he said, and we raised our glasses.