There was one person in the audience for me, Bridget O’Shea, a nurse from Mount Auburn who had taken me under her wing my first month on the job. She had told me after my second night of crying in the linen closet, “You don’t sleep, Mortensson. When did you last eat something not from a vending machine?” She had brought me sandwiches every shift after that. She brought a bouquet of carnations to graduation. She wore her good shoes. Nobody from Greenwich came. In July 2022, I started at Mass General Surgical ICU.
I had wanted ICU since the second clinical of nursing school. I wanted the kind of nursing where the line between life and death was a number on a screen and you watched the number and you did not look away. In late November 2022, a stroke patient named Theodora Brennan came in. She was 61. She had been found by her husband on the floor of her home office in Beacon Hill at 5 in the morning. She came to my unit on her third day. I was the night nurse for nine consecutive shifts. She woke up on the seventh night.
I was at the bedside checking a line when her eyes opened. She looked at my badge. She looked at my face. She looked at my badge again. What’s your name, dear? Your full name. Arlene Mortensson, ma’am. Registered nurse. She closed her eyes for a long moment. When she opened them, she said, “Mortensson, are you related to a Sloan Mortensson?” I did not understand the question. I told her evenly that I was. She did not explain. She closed her eyes again.
When she was discharged 2 weeks later, she asked the floor manager for my email address. She wrote me a thank you note. We exchanged Christmas cards. In the spring of 2023, she invited me for coffee and we met at the Charles Hotel. And I did not realize then that she was about to become the person who would eventually return to me everything that had been taken. She did not tell me that day. She told me in December 2024. In November 2024, a young woman came into the ICU at 3:00 in the morning.
22 years old. fentanyl overdose. She had been brought in by a roommate. We worked on her for 90 minutes. She did not survive. I did the post-mortem care. I called the family. I went home.
I walked into my studio in Somerville at 4 in the morning, peeled off the scrubs, and sat on the edge of my bed.
I had not opened Instagram in 6 years. I did not even know if my account still existed. I opened the app the way you open a door, you know, shouldn’t still be unlocked. The first friend suggestion was Sloan Mortensson, Harvard Law 25. The pinned post was a black and white photograph. A girl, 16, sitting on the porch of her grandmother’s house in Mystic, Connecticut, in a flannel shirt that had once been folded on a rocker, smiling at someone outside the frame.
I have to go back to June 2017 to explain what Sloan did. My grandmother, Eleanor Halverson, Nellie to her bridge club, never to my mother, was diagnosed with early-stage Parkinson’s that spring. Six weeks after the diagnosis, she drove herself to a Boston law firm called Brennan Ashford and Vance on the 26th floor of a tower on State Street. She had a 9:00 a. m. appointment with a junior associate named Theodora Brennan, who had been recommended by a friend at the Hartford Bridge Club.
Theo was 33 then, three years out of clerkship, junior to a senior partner named Mark Ashford, who handled most of the firm’s estate work. My grandmother sat in Theo’s office for an hour and a half. She told her in the order she felt mattered, the following things. She had two granddaughters. They were twins. They were not the same. One had been given everything. The other had been given a chair at the small table since she could walk.
She wanted to make sure that when she was gone, the second one would have a future her parents had decided not to give her. She wanted $389,000. The proceeds after capital gains of her second house in Mystic placed in trust for Arlene C. Mortensson distributable upon enrollment in higher education or upon her 21st birthday, whichever came first. She wanted Theodora Brennan as executor. She wanted a residual clause if Arlene predeceases or cannot be located after reasonable search balance to Sloan.
She added the residual clause herself in pencil in the margin of the draft. She told Theo, “I am not adding this because I trust the other one. I am adding it because the law makes me name a contingency and I refuse to leave the line blank.” The trust was signed June 12th, 2017. File BAV-2017-1183. In August 2018, Sloan heard about the residual clause. I did not know this then. I learned it later in a deposition. My mother and my grandmother had a fight at the kitchen table in Greenwich the week before I left home.
Sloan was upstairs. The argument was about money. My mother accused my grandmother of playing favorites. My grandmother told her the trust was not negotiable. My mother said, “Then God forbid anything happens to Arlene because Sloan is the only one who deserves it.” Sloan was sitting on the upstairs landing. Sloan heard my grandmother’s reply. Then God will not forbid it, Helena. Because if anything happens to Arlene, it will not be God. It will be one of you.
Sloan learned from that conversation that the line in the trust was predeceases or cannot be located. Three months later, my grandmother was dead. I was 18. I was in Boston. I had stopped speaking to my mother. Sloan was a freshman at Harvard. On March 2nd, 2019, an obituary appeared on a website called legacytributes. org, a small online memorial site that allows users to pay $40 and create a memorial page.
The page named Arlene C. Mortensson, age 18, of Greenwich, Connecticut, deceased on February 27th, 2019, of an apparent fentanyl overdose in Las Vegas, Nevada. There was no funeral home. There was no source. There was no photograph. The page had been created by a user account registered to an iCloud email that traced four years later to Sloan’s iPhone. The $40 payment had been made on her Bank of America debit card.
On March 21st, 2019, Sloan filed an affidavit at the Suffolk County Probate and Family Court in Boston. Form CJD411, filed under penalty of perjury. The affidavit stated that her sister Arlene C. Mortensson had passed away in Las Vegas, Nevada on February 27th, 2019 of a fentanyl overdose. That the family had been notified by friends of the deceased, that no body had been recovered for transport, that no insurance claim was being made, and that the deceased had no living issue.
Attached was a printout of the legacy tributes. org obituary. Attached was a one-page declaration signed by Helena Mortensson, my mother, stating that the family has no contact with our daughter, and has reason to believe she has passed. Attached was a separate almost identical declaration signed by Garrett Mortensson, my father. The notarization was performed remotely by a notary named Cordelia K. Witford in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Cordelia, when later interviewed, would tell investigators that she had performed the notarization over a video call and had not been physically present. Massachusetts at the time required physical presence for probate affidavit. The notarization was in legal terms void. The affidavit was reviewed at the firm of Brennan, Ashford, and Vance because the trust executor was Theo Brennan. Theo flagged it. She wrote a memo. She noted that there was no death certificate.
She noted that an online obituary on a $40 website was not corroborating evidence. She noted that the family declarations were not firsthand. She wanted the firm to require an order of presumption from the court with notice and search. Mark Ashford, her senior partner, told her, “The family is unanimous. The probate judge has accepted the filing. Move it forward.” She moved it forward.
On May 14th, 2019, Wells Fargo Trust wired 389,000 from the Halverson Trust to a Bank of America checking account.
Account ending 4302 in the name of Sloan M. Mortensson at a branch on Tremont Street in Boston. Confirmation number WF1142019. Memo line Halverson Trust Distribution per Massachusetts probate order SUF-PRO-19-0882. Sloan spent the money over 6 years 58,000 on a one-bedroom apartment on Beacon Hill from 2019 through 2022 while her parents continued to pay her Harvard tuition out of the 237,000 they had set aside for her.
