“Because the board isn’t formally notified of shareholder shifts until the quarterly meeting. Which happens to be next week.” Walsh handed me a sealed envelope. “Your father requested you read this in my presence.”
I tore the flap. It was a handwritten letter.
Alice. When you were twelve, you found a photograph in my study. It was my younger sister, Julie. She died in a car crash when she was nineteen. You are the absolute mirror image of her. The same eyes, the same laugh. Your mother could never look at you without being violently reminded that I loved someone deeply before I met her. Her jealousy mutated into resentment, and she simply erased you to protect her ego. And I, like a coward, let her do it to keep the peace in my house. I chose my comfort over your dignity for thirty years. I am giving you the sword I was too afraid to swing. Protect the company, or burn it down. I love you.
A tear slipped free, splashing against the heavy paper. The missing puzzle piece of my childhood had finally slotted into place. I wasn’t unlovable; I was just a ghost of a girl my mother couldn’t compete with.
“What do I do now?” I whispered, wiping my cheek.
“We wait,” Walsh replied coolly. “We wait for them to show their hands.”
It didn’t take long. Two days later, my mother called Northwestern Mutual to update her mailing address, only to be politely informed by a confused clerk that she had been stripped of her beneficiary status. Her frantic, screaming phone call to my father was legendary.
The following afternoon, Natalie was reviewing documents for the upcoming board meeting and stumbled across the updated state shareholder registry. She drove to my parents’ house and had a screaming match with my father, accusing him of “punishing her for not being a genetic match.”
My father had simply stared her down. “I am rewarding her for surviving the invisible life you both forced her into.”
That evening, I received a phone call from my mother. Her voice was pure, distilled liquid nitrogen.
“You think you are clever, manipulating a heavily medicated man into signing over his assets,” Claire hissed through the speaker. “You donate a kidney, play the bleeding-heart martyr, and orchestrate a hostile takeover. It is pathetic.”
“I didn’t ask for the shares, Mom,” I said calmly.
“Listen to me very carefully,” she threatened. “If you try to step foot into that boardroom, we will make you fail. We will sabotage every directive you issue. We will leak rumors to the industry press that you are incompetent. We will burn your reputation to the ground, and when the board loses faith, we will take the company back.”
She hung up. I stared at the dark screen of my phone.
I texted Russell Walsh: They know. And they threatened corporate sabotage.
