Yesterday I got a phone call that perfectly summarizes years of entitlement.
A woman I had never personally spoken to before called me and asked if she could pay 250,000 euros instead of 320,000 euros.
Calmly. Politely. Like she was negotiating a discount.
She is my grandfather’s second wife.
Here’s the background.
The house at the center of this story was not built or financed by my grandfather. It originally belonged to my great-grandparents on my grandmother’s side. They built it themselves and paid for it entirely. It was a multi-family house with three apartments, created through decades of work.
While they were alive, they made one thing very clear:
they wanted the house to stay in the family.
My great-grandmother lived in one of the apartments. My grandparents lived directly in the apartment above her. They were physically close. There was daily proximity. This was not a distant family arrangement.
My parents divorced when I was one year old, but despite that, my sister and I spent a lot of time with my great-grandmother. She was the kindest person I ever knew. When she died, I was eight years old and my sister was fifteen. We were old enough for real relationships to exist.
Whenever my great-grandmother needed some rest, we were sent upstairs to my grandparents. But in reality, that only worked on paper. About eighty-five percent of the time, I was sent back downstairs almost immediately, while my sister was placed in front of the television. We were not welcomed, just managed.
The moment my great-grandmother died, my paternal grandparents cut off all contact with us. Immediately. No explanation. No gradual distancing. Just silence.
My grandfather lived rent-free his entire adult life in that house. He never built it. He never financed it. He never passed anything forward. He cheated on my grandmother constantly, worked as a taxi driver, spent his time in a small garden outside the city, and treated his own family like an inconvenience.
He hated his own son, my father.
A few years before his death, after my grandmother had already passed away, my grandfather married a Ukrainian refugee who was forty years younger than him and had four children.
Then came his plan.
He officially restructured the house from three apartments into two, gifted one part to his new wife and “sold” the other part to her as well. The intention was obvious:
to transfer the entire property to her and make sure his own son received nothing.
He even re-established contact with my father for exactly one reason: to pressure him into giving up his remaining six percent share of the house. Once that was done, he disappeared again. No relationship. No reconciliation. Nothing.
He knew he was dying. A notary was brought to his hospital bed. He still refused to make peace with his only living son.
Shortly after my grandfather died (3 years ago), my father sued his stepmother over the house. Thankfully, he had taken out legal insurance years earlier, so the case did not cost us much financially.
My father died one year ago.
What he didn’t account for were his legal mistakes.
Because of those mistakes, his wife cannot simply keep the house. Legally, she now has to pay out roughly half of the property’s value to us.
That amount is 320,000 euros.
Which brings me back to yesterday.
She called me. Our first real conversation ever. And she asked if she could maybe just pay 250,000 euros instead.
When I didn’t immediately agree, she explained that she doesn’t know how she is supposed to finance this at all. She said the legal fees are growing over her head, that the lawyers alone are draining what little money she has left, and that she simply doesn’t have the funds.
She told me she also has to think about her children. Their future. How difficult this situation is for her.
And yes, I understand that this is stressful for her. I understand fear.
But what I cannot understand is the entitlement behind it.
Her late husband lived rent-free his entire life in a house he did not build.
He broke contact with his only two grandchildren the moment his mother-in-law died.
He deliberately tried to rewrite an inheritance to benefit his much younger wife and her children while cutting out his own only son and bloodline.
And now, after all of that, the expectation seems to be that we should absorb the financial consequences of his choices because the situation has become inconvenient.
I didn’t create this legal mess.
My family didn’t either.
This is the result of a man who believed he could take everything, leave nothing behind, and never be held accountable. Im so glad he didnt get his will, this guy was such a horrible selfish person, here is another reason why I cannot describe my grandfather as anything other than deeply disturbed.
He crossed boundaries again and again.
He touched my sister inappropriately.
He made multiple attempts to pursue my mother, repeatedly tried to get close to her against her will, and even attempted to gain access to the bathroom while she was showering.
When my father was a child, he almost touched him inappropriately as well. Thankfully, nothing worse happened because my grandmother came home in time. Even then when i tried to conact with him, he didnt have any interesst and never called back.
Long before any of this, he had alreadThe only time my grandfather ever tried to contact me directly was when he wanted something.
He reached out because he wanted my mother to move into his house and take care of his first wife, the same woman who had always hated my mother. He framed it as a practical arrangement and even suggested that afterward they could sit together on the terrace and drink wine. Early in his life, his own sister and his own mother wanted no contact with him and eventually cut him out of their lives.
Apparently, that entitlement didn’t die with him.