The numbers were worse than I’d imagined.
Victoria had transferred my father’s Mount Pleasant home—worth around $1.2 million—into her LLC with a forged signature. She’d withdrawn $380,000 from his retirement account. She’d opened credit cards in his name and charged nearly $47,000 in personal expenses, including a boutique in Savannah and a weekend in Aspen.
She’d siphoned $215,000 from a joint account into a private trust.
And, as if to prove greed has no bottom, Patricia uncovered missing funds from the Hail-Beckett Foundation—money that was supposed to go to local causes. At least $85,000 redirected through “consulting fees” into accounts tied to Victoria.
The total: more than $1.8 million.
When Patricia laid it all out on Marcus’s conference table, my father went gray.
“I thought I was taking care of my family,” he murmured, staring at the spreadsheets.
“You were,” Marcus said quietly. “She wasn’t.”
My father started therapy the next week, at Marcus’s insistence. He didn’t argue. He looked like a man waking up from a long, expensive dream.
Meanwhile, Victoria kept throwing parties.