“He’ll come in soft,” Elias said. “Concerned husband. Asset protection. Corporate exposure. He’ll want you exhausted when he presents it. He’ll make himself the only safe place to lean.”
I nodded. “Can he claim the trust?”
“Not if it’s structured the way your father set it up.”
My father.
At the sound of him, something in my chest tightened.
My father had died three years earlier. He had been the only person in my family who saw my ambition and didn’t treat it like a contagious disease. He taught high school economics, fixed everything himself, and distrusted any system that rewarded charm more than work. Before cancer took him, he put what he could into an irrevocable trust and made sure I understood exactly why.
“Your mother loves people until money enters the room,” he told me once from his hospital bed, voice ragged but eyes clear. “Then she starts choosing mirrors over blood.”
I had thought that was grief talking. Or bitterness. I know now it was simple, brutal clarity.
Elias pulled a yellow legal pad toward him and began writing.
“We do not stop him,” he said.
I looked up.