Grandpa left shares of the company in Mom’s name.

And there are emails on here where Dad’s trying to trick her into signing them over to him.” The murmurs became an uproar.

Because it was true: my late father-in-law, Joe’s own father, who had actually seen me across the decade I worked for that family, had willed me a minority stake in Vance Global before he died four years earlier — payment, in his quiet way, for the ten years I’d spent running the public relations and the crisis control and the partnerships that Joe never understood and never once thanked me for.

Joe had hated that I held those shares from the day the will was read.