Margaret sat behind her desk with three thick corporate ledgers piled by her left elbow.

She picked up her silver pen and tapped it twice on a yellow legal pad.

“Brandon has no legal authority to stop your two-thousand-dollar monthly disbursement,” Margaret said.

She flipped a page in the ledger and pointed to a column of numbers written in clean black ink.

“Mitchell Family Holdings is a registered corporate entity.

You’re the sole managing director of that entity.”

I took Evelyn’s reading glasses out of my breast pocket and started polishing the thin gold wire frame with my white handkerchief.