Vela had worked the posthumous desk for eighteen years and she could tell, from the thickness of a file and from a single line of intake data, what kind of case it was going to be. This one was thick. Thirty-one years of estrangement and a petition filed forty-seven days after the death. That was almost always a case about something the petitioner already knew and needed confirmed, or something they'd been afraid to know and had finally run out of reasons to avoid.
She read the file from the beginning.
The father had initiated a forgiveness proceeding fourteen years ago. He had filed the standard Form 9-A, named his son Adal as the other party, described the estrangement in the required paragraph. He had not contacted Adal to proceed. The proceeding required both parties. Without Adal's participation, it could not advance.
He had renewed the initiation every year for fourteen years. The renewal form was a single page. It asked: do you wish to continue this proceeding? He had checked yes, fourteen times, the last time eight months before he died.
The proceeding had never been completed. This was what the record said.
Adal's petition had one question: did his father complete a forgiveness proceeding for their estrangement before he died?
The answer was no. The answer was also that his father had been renewing the intention annually for fourteen years without once reaching for the phone.
Vela had seen cases where a completed proceeding proved nothing and cases where the absence of one proved nothing. She had processed 4,000 posthumous petitions. She had answered the question that was asked in 3,997 of them.
She picked up the phone.
She would tell him: no, it was not completed. She would tell him what the record said, which was the full record, because the full record was what he had petitioned for. He would receive it the way everyone received what they had petitioned for: in language that could only carry part of what the document meant.
The phone rang twice.