“Vance isn’t worried about his license, sweetheart. He is worried about the $200,000 in gambling debts I covered for him in Atlantic City last winter. He writes exactly what I tell him to write.”
The realization hit me with the weight of a stone. He wasn’t just a bully. He was a puppet master who collected people’s sins and used them as leashes. He truly believed he could lock me away in a facility and steal my life just because he held a marker on a degenerate gambler.
He thought this was his checkmate.
He leaned forward, the smell of wine and arrogance rolling off him. “You sign the transfer of control to me voluntarily, or Dr. Vance files these in the morning. Your stock tanks, your investors flee, and I take over anyway to ‘save’ you. It is your choice.”
I looked at the manila envelope, then up at him. He looked triumphant, a man who had just played an Ace. He expected me to crumble. He expected the old Greina to beg him not to ruin her reputation.
But I just had one question left. A loose thread I needed to cut before I tightened the noose.
“Why?” I asked, my voice barely above a whisper.
Edward raised an eyebrow. “Why what?”
“Not the business. Not the money. Why Julian? He is a brilliant architect. He treats me like gold. Why did you hate him enough to try to starve us?”
Edward chuckled, the sound wet and ugly. He took another sip of wine, relaxed now that he thought he had won.
“Hate him? I don’t hate him, Greina. I don’t think about him at all. He was just a necessary casualty.”
He leaned back, spreading his hands. “You needed to learn that you couldn’t survive without me. So, I made a few calls. Boston is a small town for people with my influence. I told the top five architecture firms that if they hired your husband, Ashford Financial would pull every construction loan we held with them.”
He smiled, remembering it like a fond memory. “I heard you two were living in a basement in Southie for a while. Eating ramen. Wearing second-hand coats. I admit, I checked your credit reports occasionally, just to see how close you were to breaking.”
My blood ran cold. “You checked our credit reports?”
“I wasn’t being cruel, sweetheart,” he said, dismissing my horror with a wave of his hand. “I was being a father. I had to let you hit rock bottom so you would remember who holds the ladder.”
There it was. The confession.
He didn’t just watch us struggle. He engineered it. Every night I cried myself to sleep worrying about rent. Every time Julian came home defeated from another rejected interview. Every meal we skipped so we could buy paint for the hotel lobby. Edward had orchestrated it all from this dining room table. He viewed our poverty as his parenting strategy.
The last microscopic grain of guilt I felt for what I was about to do evaporated instantly.
I reached out and slid the envelope with the fake psychiatric evaluations back across the table. It hit his wine glass with a sharp tink.
“You love leverage, Dad,” I said, my voice hardening into steel. “So, let us talk about yours.”
“What are you doing?” he snapped, his smile faltering. “You sign those papers or Vance files in the morning!”
“Dr. Vance can file whatever he wants. It won’t matter. Because you are not negotiating with the CEO of Grain Hospitality anymore.”
I opened the heavy legal binder I had placed on the table. Inside wasn’t a merger agreement. It was a stack of transfer documents stamped with the seal of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.
I turned the binder around so he could read the cover page.
“You took out a $28 million bridge loan six months ago from a private equity firm called Cerberus Capital. High interest. Short-term. Backed by your personal guarantee and secured by fifty-one percent of your voting shares in Ashford Financial.”
Edward’s face went gray. “That is confidential. How do you know that?”
