The Eight Heirs I Raised and Bankrupted

Chapter 2 Eight Letters

The letters went out at seven in the morning in sealed white envelopes with the foundation's return address, so that the doorman at every building in the city would accept them without question.

I stayed in bed until nine, which I never did, and I listened to the house.

At eight, Marcus arrived on the front steps and stood there with the letter in his hand. I watched him from the upstairs window. He read it twice. The second time his mouth moved, silently forming the words. Then he looked up at the house, and I stepped back from the glass so he would not see me.

He rang the bell. He rang it eleven times.

The housekeeper answered on the twelfth, told him I was not receiving, and shut the door.

At eight thirty, Julian's car pulled into the drive. He did not ring the bell. He had a key, which I would be changing by noon. I heard him cross the marble floor and climb the stairs, and I heard him stop at my study door and knock with two knuckles.

"Emma."

I opened the door.

He was dressed for a meeting in a navy suit, and his jaw was set, and in his hand was the letter, already creased from being folded and unfolded.

"You can't do this," he said.

"Which part?"

"Any of it. The surgery. The liens on the houses. You'd bankrupt every one of us and call it a lesson. The foundation bylaws require a family council to sign off on a change of trustees. You went around them."

"I didn't go around them," I said. "I read them. There's a clause in the trust that my husband added in the last year of his life. If any beneficiary attempts to divert trust assets for personal gain, the grantor's surviving spouse has sole authority to restructure."

Julian's face went very still.

"Frank wouldn't have written that."

"He did write it. He wrote it the week after you forged his signature on a loan application, and he never told you, because he was too ashamed to admit to me that one of his boys had tried it."

The letter in Julian's hand crumpled.

"You think you know everything," he said. "You think because you paid for our school and our teeth and our cars that you own us. We're not puppies, Emma. You can't just take us to the vet and have us fixed."

"No," I said. "I can't. But I can take back the house in the hills that you never paid a dollar for. I can close the trust account with your name on it. And I can tell the hospital that the surgeries I scheduled are canceled, if you'd like, which would be the merciful thing to do, since I no longer think any of you deserve to be kept safe from yourselves."

He looked at me for a long moment.

"You've been planning this for months," he said.

"Ten years," I said. "I've been planning it since the day I realized you'd started calling Candace a prize."

He took a step forward, and for the first time since he was a teenager, I was afraid of him.

"Then I'll fight you," he said. "And I'll win. I have every email you ever sent about the trust. I have the partnership agreement from the vineyard. I've been on the foundation board for six years, and I know where the bodies are buried because I helped bury them."

The breath left my chest.

"So we're doing this," I said.

"We're doing this," he said.

He turned and walked down the stairs, and I heard the front door slam hard enough to shake the frame in its setting. I stood in the study and put my hand on the desk to steady myself, because he had said the one thing I had not prepared for.

The vineyard. The partnership agreement. There was a document I had signed in a weak year, and if he had it, he had leverage I could not simply outvote.

Candace appeared at the top of the stairs in her robe. She had heard all of it.

"He's going to hurt us," she said.

"He's going to try," I said.

"He knows things."

"He knows the things I let him know," I said, and I was surprised by how steady my own voice was. "There's a difference."

"Mama, what are you going to do?"

I walked past her into the bedroom and began to dress. Grey dress, flat shoes, no jewelry. A woman going to work.

"I'm going to see what eight letters actually bought me," I said.

By ten, I was in the lawyer's office downtown, and Mr. Reyes, who was seventy and had handled my husband's estate since before I married him, was spreading papers across the table.

"The surgeries," he said. "You paid for eight procedures next Tuesday at the clinic in Santa Mora. Are you actually going through with them?"

"No," I said. "The letters were the warning. The surgeries were the consequence. If they cooperate, nobody goes under a knife."

Reyes raised his eyebrows. "That's a strange mercy."

"It's not mercy," I said. "It's leverage. And it's ending. Tell the clinic to hold the appointments but don't cancel them. I want each of those men to know exactly where they were supposed to be on Tuesday, and I want them to understand that I can make that schedule permanent with one phone call."

Reyes wrote something in his notebook and did not look at me.

"Yesterday," he said, "you were planning to take back the deeds. Today you're threatening sterilization. Which story do you want to be true?"

I thought about it.

"The one where they leave my daughter alone," I said. "Whatever that costs."

"Then tell me about the vineyard agreement," Reyes said. "Because I've heard from two separate sources this morning that Julian is retaining counsel, and the first thing his lawyer will do is file an injunction against the trust restructuring using that partnership agreement."

I put both hands flat on the table.

"How bad is it?" I asked.

"Bad," he said. "If the agreement is valid, he has a claim to a percentage of the vineyard revenue for as long as he lives, and the trust can't be restructured without settling his interest first. It could take years. He could drain you in fees alone."

I sat back.

"Then I need to see the original," I said.

"The original is in the house," Reyes said. "In the safe, or wherever Frank kept that kind of thing. I've never seen it. Julian's copy is the only one anyone has ever produced."

"Then there's no original," I said.

Reyes looked at me for a moment and then smiled, very slightly, the way a man does when he recognizes that he is working with someone dangerous.

"There's no original," he repeated. "Prove it."