Chương 4
“I’m not going to flip a table.”
“I didn’t think you were.”
“You sounded like you did.”
“I’ve met families.”
That made me laugh despite myself.
Two weeks later, Rebecca received copies of corporate records that were not available through the public database.
She asked me to come to her office.
There were seventeen signatures attributed to me.
I recognized none of them as mine.
One document included an address where notices had supposedly been mailed.
It was my parents’ house.
Another listed an email address.
The address contained my name followed by my birth year.
I had never used it.
Rebecca opened her laptop.
“We checked whether the domain records tell us anything useful.”
“And?”
“Not enough yet.”
She rotated the screen toward me.
“The account itself may be inaccessible without legal process, and we’re not going to play amateur detective with passwords.”
I nodded.
Then I saw a photocopy near her elbow.
“What’s that?”
She hesitated before handing it over.
It was a shareholder consent from seven years earlier.
My signature appeared at the bottom.
Beside it was a witness signature.
Diane Mercer.
My mother.
The room became very quiet.
“She witnessed me signing something when I was five hundred miles away.”
“That’s what the document represents.”
“She forged it.”
“We don’t know who physically wrote your name.”
“She witnessed it.”
“Yes.”
Rebecca never raised her voice.
That made the facts worse.
I stared at my mother’s signature.
It was unmistakable.
Big D.
Hard downward stroke.
The same flourish she used on birthday cards and permission slips and every note she had ever written excusing Madison from school.
“What happens if I challenge this?”
Rebecca folded her hands.
“Potentially several things, depending on what the complete records show.”
“Money?”
“Money, ownership, representations made during the sale, possibly tax issues, possibly claims against individuals.”
“My father?”
“Potentially.”
“Madison?”
“Potentially.”
I stood and walked to the window.
Below us, a man was struggling to collapse a stroller while a toddler watched with complete indifference.
“Could this stop the sale?”
“It could complicate it.”
“Could it destroy the company?”
Rebecca took a moment before answering.
“A dispute over ownership can damage a closely held business, especially during an acquisition.”
My stomach tightened.
For twelve years, I had imagined confronting my family in simple terms.
You hurt me.
I survived.
Look at me now.
There had been a childish cleanliness to the fantasy.
Nobody lost jobs in it.
Nobody defaulted on mortgages.
The store employed thirty-two people according to its website.
Some had worked there when I was a teenager.
I remembered Earl from deliveries sneaking powdered doughnuts behind the loading dock because his wife had put him on a diet.
I remembered Mrs. Chen in upholstery keeping hard candy in her desk.
They had nothing to do with my mother’s signature.
“What if I do nothing?”
Rebecca’s expression changed slightly.
“You can choose not to pursue a claim.”
“And the sale goes through?”
“I can’t promise that.”
“What happens to whatever I own?”
“That is one reason I would not advise doing nothing.”
I sat again.
Rebecca slid a document toward me.
“This is the part I need you to focus on.”
It was connected to the pending acquisition.
My supposed consent to the sale had been signed eight months earlier.
Before Madison announced her engagement.
The consideration attributed to my shares was much larger this time.
$1.84 million.
I looked up.
Rebecca watched me carefully.
“I don’t have one point eight million dollars.”
“I know.”
“Where did it go?”
“We don’t know.”
For the first time since I had opened the wedding invitation, anger arrived without confusion attached to it.
It was cold and embarrassing and enormous.
My mother had mocked me for being the daughter who would always have to work for what she got.
Then somebody had spent years quietly taking what was already mine.
I left Rebecca’s office with instructions not to contact my family until she had completed several more checks.
I lasted six days.
My father called me on the seventh.
I almost let it go to voicemail.
Then I answered.
“Claire?”
His voice had aged.
That caught me off guard more effectively than an apology would have.
“Hi, Dad.”
He breathed out.
“I wasn’t sure you’d answer.”
“Neither was I.”
There was noise behind him, the hollow movement of furniture across a showroom floor.
For a moment I could smell leather conditioner and the burnt coffee from the old employee machine.
“I saw your RSVP,” he said.
“Okay.”
“I’m glad you’re coming.”
I waited.
He cleared his throat.
“Your mother is too.”
I nearly laughed.
“Is she?”
“She doesn’t know how to handle this.”
“Twelve years gave her some preparation time.”
“Claire.”
There it was.
The old warning hidden inside my name.
Not anger.
Containment.
Be easier.
Make this manageable.
I leaned back in my chair.
“Dad, I need to ask you something.”
Silence.
Not ordinary silence.
A silence with recognition inside it.
I had not even asked the question.
My hand tightened around the phone.
“Did I ever own part of the store?”
The sounds behind him seemed to disappear.
“Who told you that?”
My pulse began hammering.
“That isn’t an answer.”
“Claire, where are you?”
“At work.”
“Who have you been talking to?”
I closed my eyes.
“You knew.”
“No.”
“You knew there was something to know.”
“Listen to me.”
“I’m listening.”
He lowered his voice.
“This is not something we discuss over the phone.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s complicated.”
“Was my signature forged?”
He said nothing.
“Dad?”
“Come to the wedding.”
The answer was so wrong that I actually pulled the phone away and looked at it.
“What?”
“Come home.”
“I am not waiting three weeks to discuss this between a rehearsal dinner and Madison’s cake.”
“Please.”
He sounded frightened now.
Not guilty.
Not yet.
Frightened.
“Does Madison know?”
Another pause.
Then my father said the sentence that changed the question entirely.
May you like
“Claire, Nathan cannot know you’re looking into this.”
For several seconds, I said nothing.
