“You were never part of this family—you’re nothing but a useless freeloader carrying my grandson, so get under that table, eat what we throw away, and be grateful my son still lets you live in his house.”

Lucas left Gwen at the hospital only after Ava, Gwen’s older sister, arrived with a tote bag, lip balm, and the blunt competence of a woman who had raised three teenagers and no longer believed men fixed things quickly.

At the office near Hartsfield, Mason was waiting outside Lucas’s glass-walled corner office with his jaw set.

“You skipped the bank,” he said. “Do you understand what that does to us?”

“I understand I’m not signing a renewal until I know why Mercer’s billing us like a private country club.”

Mason blinked. “What?”

Tasha closed the door behind them and laid three folders on the conference table. She had highlighted pages in yellow and blue.

“Storage invoices from Mercer,” she said. “Regular ones in yellow. Add-on fees in blue. The blue ones started seven months ago. They were approved under your login.”

Lucas stared down at the pages. Fuel surcharges. Rush transfer fees. Special handling. None of it matched their actual usage.

“I didn’t approve this.”

Tasha slid over a printed access report from their accounting platform. “That’s what I thought.”

Brenda still had old administrative permissions from when she helped during the pandemic. Lucas had kept meaning to clean up the access list. He never had.

Mason dragged a hand over his mouth. “Why wasn’t I told?”

“I raised it twice,” Tasha said, still looking at Lucas. “Your mother said you were aware and that I was overreacting.”

Lucas felt something old and ugly shift inside him. Not just anger. Shame.

He flipped to the last page and stopped.

Invoice approved at 2:14 a.m., six weeks earlier.

He knew exactly where he had been at 2:14 that morning—wedged into an aisle seat on a red-eye home from Dallas, asleep with his jacket over his face.

“This goes beyond bad bookkeeping,” he said.

Tasha nodded once. “Yes.”

Lucas looked at Mason. “Freeze any new payments to Mercer. No exceptions.”

Mason hesitated only a second. “Done.”

Lucas reached for his phone to call Brenda, then stopped. Rage would get him noise, not truth.

“What else?” he asked.