Chapter 5 - What Her Father Had Allowed
Robert didn’t deny it this time.
He sat at the breakfast table where Amelia had eaten pancakes as a child and stared at his hands.
“I let Richard use the device.”
Amelia felt something inside her go cold.
“Why?”
“Not to impersonate you.”
“That’s exactly what happened.”
“He told me you’d approved the transfers verbally.”
“And you believed him?”
Robert looked away.
That was the answer.
Not entirely.
Two years earlier, Carrington Coastal had nearly violated a lending covenant after wildfire insurance costs and delayed resort construction squeezed cash flow.
Richard had helped Robert quietly restructure several obligations.
He had also invested his own money.
A lot of it.
Robert had come to see him as the son he never had.
The capable outsider who solved problems without asking for praise.
Amelia had loved that about Richard too.
“He saved us from a humiliating refinancing,” Robert said.
“So you stopped checking his work.”
Robert flinched.
Amelia understood because she had done the same thing.
When Richard said he would handle something, she let him.
When he dismissed questions with affectionate jokes, she let him.
When Diane once complained that Richard demanded unusual access, Amelia told her he was under pressure.
She had spent years avoiding conflict and calling it trust.
Robert opened the preserved transaction report.
Several transfers went to companies with bland names: Cobalt Advisory, Pacific Strategic Services, Alder Ridge Management.
Diane had already identified one connection.
Cobalt’s registered mailing address matched a private mailbox used by Vale Meridian.
Richard’s company.
Twenty-seven million dollars had moved through it in eleven months.
Robert looked physically ill.
“He told me those were project expenses.”
“Did you ever verify them?”
“No.”
Amelia thought of Richard removing her harness.
Then she thought of the dinner where he had laughed about pregnancy brain.
He hadn’t been improvising.
He needed people to doubt her questions.
Robert reached for her hand.
She moved hers away.
“Did you know he wanted my voting authority?”
“Yes.”
“How badly?”
Robert didn’t answer.
“Dad.”
“He said the lenders needed certainty before today.”
Amelia stared at him.
“Today?”
Robert closed his eyes.
There it was again.
The deadline.
The helicopter flight.
The financial confirmation due at five.
Richard’s sudden obsession with succession authority.
All connected.
But Robert added something Amelia hadn’t expected.
“He wasn’t asking for your shares permanently.”
Amelia frowned.
May you like
“He only needed to control your vote for six months.”
And for the first time, she wondered whether Richard had ever been trying to inherit her fortune at all.
