It was made to work.”

Chapter 17 — The Audit

The corporate audit I had ordered from the floor of the terminal took weeks, and it exposed the full architecture of what my mother had built, brick by patient brick.

The systems engineers recovered archived emails from Genevieve’s personal account in which she instructed a former executive secretary of mine to scan my signature onto corporate documents for what she called urgent estate matters.

They found another thread, months long, in which my mother gave standing orders that any personal mail or package addressed to me from Rosalind was to be pulled from my correspondence and redirected, unopened, to Oliver Vance’s law office.

The retired secretary, when investigators reached her, confirmed all of it in a sworn affidavit — she had done as instructed, she said, and she had believed, the entire time, that she was acting on my authorization, because the orders came from my mother and it never occurred to her to doubt them.