Part 5
The next six weeks were the strangest of my life.
I had spent over a decade believing, somewhere underneath the version of myself I showed the world, that I was fundamentally untrustworthy — that some careless mistake in my twenties had cost my family a small fortune and cost me my father’s trust before he died. I had built an entire company partly to prove that version of myself wrong. I had never told anyone, not even my wife, how much energy that quiet shame consumed. Now it turned out none of it had ever been true, and I didn’t know what to do with the space that left behind.
Priya Shah — no, that was Hannah’s lawyer, not mine. Mine was a forensic litigation attorney named Robert Klein, brought in by Northline’s general counsel the morning after the banquet. He was blunt, thorough, and did not seem impressed by anything, which after that night was exactly what I needed.
“Here’s where we stand,” he told me, laying folders across my dining room table. “Forgery of a $24,800 wire authorization, twelve years ago. Creation of a shell vendor, Northstar Procurement, roughly eighteen months ago, using your stolen identity as beneficial owner. Altered probate documents from your father’s estate. And a pattern of duplicate and manipulated invoices routed through Vantage totaling just under one point one million dollars.”
“A million dollars,” I repeated. The number didn’t feel real. It felt like something from a news segment about someone else’s life.
“Give or take,” Robert said. “The financial-crimes team is still tracing it. Some went to real subcontractors for real work. Some went into accounts we can’t fully explain yet. Some appears to have gone toward personal debts — a boat loan, a second mortgage on a lake property your brother never mentioned to your mother.”
I sat down slowly. “What about the will?”
“That’s the part that actually surprised me,” Robert said. “Because it’s provable in a way the financial fraud almost isn’t. Your sister found a locked firebox with what appears to be the original signed distribution page, giving you and Adrian equal fifty percent shares of Mercer Auto Supply. We also tracked down the notary who witnessed the original signing twelve years ago — a woman named Dolores Feig, seventy-one, retired, living in Scottsdale. She kept archived scans of every document she notarized for insurance purposes, a habit from an old fraud case early in her career. She still had it.”
“She still had it,” I said, almost laughing, the sound coming out wrong, somewhere between relief and disbelief. “After twelve years.”
—END OF Chapter 3, —PRESS NEXT PART IN BOTTOM OF PAGE TO READ NEXT Chapter
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