Chapter 12 - WHAT DEREK WAS PROTECTING
Laura arranged the meeting at Coastal Printworks with both attorneys present.
The shop no longer sounded alive. Two presses stood idle. Unfinished restaurant menus remained stacked beside the cutter. Heather and the other employees had been sent home.
Derek waited near Thomas’s old drafting table, which Marianne had given him when the business opened.
“You brought lawyers to talk to your son,” he said.
“You brought forged authority to control your mother.”
He looked past her.
Naomi sat at the far end of the room beside her attorney.
Derek laughed once, without humor. “So she gets to sit there like a witness?”
“No,” Marianne said. “She sits there as someone who participated.”
Naomi stared at the floor.
Derek insisted the fake invoices were Naomi’s idea. Naomi reminded him that he chose the amounts and scheduled the emergency visits.
“You practiced what to say in the car,” she said. “You timed the chest-pain visits before bills were due.”
“You told me nobody would get hurt.”
“Your mother was selling her belongings.”
“You said she had money.”
Marianne raised a hand.
They stopped because she was no longer asking either of them for permission to speak.
“What were you trying to save?” she asked Derek.
“The shop.”
“Why?”
His jaw shifted.
“Because Dad believed I could make it work.”
“Your father believed you could work. He didn’t believe the building mattered more than the people inside it.”
Derek looked toward the silent presses.
After Thomas died, Derek had expanded too quickly, hiring staff and leasing equipment to prove the business was more than a favor from his father. When the school contract vanished, he hid the losses because closing the shop felt like admitting Thomas had been wrong about him.
Then Marianne paid the first false medical bill.
“It was supposed to be once,” Derek said.
“And the hospital gown?”
His eyes dropped.
“People don’t question a hospital gown.”
The honesty was small and ugly.
Marianne asked about the power of attorney.
Derek blamed Naomi until Naomi opened a message showing he had written: Make it broad enough that she can’t undo anything while she’s scared.
Derek moved toward her.
“You saved that?”
Naomi stepped back.
He reached for the laptop on the drafting table, but Laura’s investigator blocked him.
Derek stopped inches away.
The meeting ended without a confession, but his reaction revealed what he still valued most.
Not his mother.
May you like
Not Naomi.
Control of the records.
