The next day I made my way to Doug Grenfell’s office in Deer Park. You’ll know Doug Grenfell, he was Dad’s lawyer and it’s no secret that there’s no love lost between us. It was obviously a big day for me but I was also thinking, ‘I won’t ever have to come back,’ because my idea was to sell the Deer Park house and never visit Melbourne again.

When I got to Doug’s office, I remember Doug looked weird, like he’d been waiting for me with bad news. He asked me if I wanted a glass of water and I said no, and waited with my handbag in my lap for him to say, ‘Okay, well then, here’s the will, and once you’ve got the death certificate organised we’ll get the house at Deer Park on the market, and six weeks from now you’ll have the money.’

But that wasn’t what he said. What he said instead was, ‘I have to tell you, Snow. There’s a complication.’

Now, I know I don’t need to go through the whole story, Jack. You know it all, but I couldn’t get what Doug meant by ‘a complication’, and so like an idiot I said, ‘Is it a good complication or a bad complication?’ Like there’s ever a good complication! Doug said, ‘It might well be both, depending on how you feel, Snow,’ which made no sense. And then he said, ‘Alright, here we go: just before he died your father told me that you’re not an only child after all. You have a sister.’

You’re going to be wondering how I reacted to that, Jack, and I’ll tell you how I reacted to that.

I laughed!

I laughed because it was so ridiculous. Honestly, my first thought was, ‘Pull the other one, Doug.’ And then, ‘Is this really the time to be cracking jokes, when I’ve just buried my father?’

But Doug didn’t laugh, so then I thought, ‘Is this bloke trying to rob me? Is this some kind of weird stunt, designed to get me to carve off a slice of the fortune and hand it over to Grenfell and Sons on the premise that they’ll take care of everything? Because that’s not going to work.’

But then Doug said, ‘I’m sorry, Snow, I know it comes out of the blue.’

It was slowly dawning on me that this was no joke, and I said, ‘You’re not kidding, are you?’

Doug said, ‘No, I’m not kidding. You do have a sister. And it’s a bit exciting, isn’t it? A sister, after all these years!’

I don’t need to tell you that ‘exciting’ wasn’t really the word that I was thinking of. I was thinking of words like, ‘this is ridiculous’, but then it dawned on me that the reason Doug was even telling me was obviously because Dad had left this sister something in his will.

I said, ‘Well, spit it out, Doug. Who is this woman and how much money do I have to give her?’