Chapter 7: The First Aftershocks
Sunday morning arrived without any message from my parents. The silence was consistent with the ultimatum they had delivered; having ordered me out of the family, they appeared determined to maintain the posture even after the family event had imploded. What did arrive were three separate contacts from Vance Crest Holdings. The external counsel who had received the flash drive the previous afternoon requested a formal meeting to review the chain of custody on the forged share-transfer documents and the retirement-account diversion. A board member who had been seated in the third row asked, carefully, whether I intended to pursue restoration of the ownership position that had been removed while I was in the hospital. A mid-level finance manager who still remembered the years I had spent building the company’s internal controls simply wrote: “The hold is in place. Nothing is being deleted.”
I answered each message with the same limited precision. I would make the original source files available through counsel. I would not discuss motives. I would not negotiate in informal channels what belonged in formal ones. The box had been the public presentation. The rest would move through the slower, more durable systems that did not require my presence at a church.
