Three hours before dinner, I had sent one encrypted file to Alton’s personal tablet — only his, no one else’s.

Inside were itemized receipts, wire logs, and bank statements showing that Lindsay hadn’t contributed a single dollar toward his grand birthday weekend, though Mildred had spent months telling everyone Lindsay was funding it out of her own earnings.

But that wasn’t the part that made Alton’s hands shake.

The file also held screenshots of a private group chat — Mildred, Roxanne, and Lindsay — in which the three of them planned how to pressure Alton into changing his living trust the weekend after his birthday, to redraw his real-estate holdings so that only Roxanne’s children would be named.

In one message Mildred had written it plainly: that my children carried common blood, not the family line, and the family’s assets had to stay where they belonged.

That was the plan the whole weekend had been built around, I realized as I read it — the reason for the grand celebration, the sentiment, the softening-up.