I was sitting across from Mom and Dad in the glass-walled conference room, the morning light casting a professional glow on what felt like an interrogation room. "He's got his head on straight," Mom said, her fingers drumming a staccato on the table, her lawyer's mind always dissecting angles. "Alex is smart, and capable."
Dad, the eternal skeptic with furrowed brows, leaned back in his chair, his fingers tented in contemplation. "Too capable," he mused, the lines deepening around his eyes. "I get the sense he sees us as another rung on his ladder. Just a means for expansion."
There it was—the crux of the matter laid out on the mahogany table between us. I should have been weighing in, offering insights from my own interactions with Alex. Instead, I found myself caught in a cyclone of in
