I am not grateful to my father, although I tried to be. For about two months, I convinced myself that he had protected me and made sure everything was handled fairly. But the more I thought about it, the more uncomfortable I became. For four years, he had sat in that house, marking bank statements and watching his own son take money from his account. Yet he never confronted him. Not once. He could have asked Callum what was happening. He could have given him a chance to explain. Instead, he kept everything inside a shoebox and arranged for a solicitor to reveal it after his death.

I later learned from Callum’s wife that he had lost his job in February 2021, just one month before becoming a signatory on Dad’s account. He had two children in school and a mortgage he could no longer afford. He hadn’t told anyone about his financial troubles. Suddenly, the situation looked different. Two men lived eleven minutes apart, both struggling with things they couldn’t bring themselves to say. For four years, neither managed to speak one honest sentence to the other. My father chose a recording and legal documents instead of a conversation. He died six weeks after making that recording, leaving us to deal with the consequences without him. That isn’t justice to me. It feels like a man who couldn’t bear to be in the room when the truth finally came out.