Chapter 9 - The Company That Could No Longer Keep It Private
Mercer Event Group’s bank placed the company under enhanced monitoring.
The board hired an interim chief financial officer.
Diane’s voting authority was temporarily restricted.
Vanessa remained suspended.
Rachel could have returned in a limited advisory role, but Monica advised against it while the assault investigation and company review overlapped.
For the first time in fifteen years, Rachel woke on Monday without opening a cash-flow report.
She hated how empty that felt.
Police meanwhile executed search warrants on Derek’s business records after the bank transfers and evidence from the wedding.
They recovered pieces of aluminum from a fabrication bin consistent in composition with the fragments collected from the cannon and Rachel’s injury.
That did not prove who cut them.
Aaron’s footage showed who handled them.
The accounting evidence became harder.
Several large invoices carried Rachel’s digital authorization.
Derek’s attorney claimed Rachel approved them, then invented the missing-token story after the wedding because she hated him.
The company’s own logs initially supported him.
Then the forensic team looked at location data.
Rachel’s hardware token had been used from the bridal suite network on Saturday morning.
Rachel’s phone was simultaneously connected to the salon Wi-Fi twelve miles away.
Vanessa’s laptop had connected to the bridal-suite network three minutes before each approval.
Still, one uncomfortable fact remained.
Two older Sloan invoices had genuinely been approved by Rachel.
She remembered them.
She had believed Derek’s explanation that specialized lighting equipment costs had risen.
“I signed those without checking enough,” she told the board.
Diane tried to reassure her.
“Anyone could have.”
Rachel shook her head.
“No. I’m the CFO.”
That admission mattered.
Rachel had spent years defining herself as the responsible sister. The wedding made it tempting to divide the family into Rachel the careful one and Vanessa the reckless one.
Reality was less flattering.
Rachel had missed warning signs because she trusted her own systems too much.
She had dismissed Vanessa’s complaints as emotional.
She had stopped asking what Diane was afraid of because she assumed her mother simply hated conflict.
Her mistakes did not cause the assault.
They did help the financial secret grow.
Then the forensic accountant found an email Derek had sent Vanessa six days before the wedding.
If Rachel gets the board Monday, your mother goes down first. You and I lose everything after that.
Vanessa replied:
Then Monday cannot happen.
Rachel read the exchange.
The cannon was not a drunken joke.
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It was part of a plan to stop Monday.
The only remaining question was how far Vanessa believed that plan was supposed to go.
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