Chapter 7 - The Inheritance Ledger
The front door didn't slam when Ryan left. That was the most pathetic part of it.
He packed his duffel bag in twenty minutes—three shirts, two pairs of slacks, his toiletries, and the expensive leather-bound planner his mother had given him for his thirtieth birthday—and carried it out to his car without looking back once.
He paused by the driver’s side door, looking over the roof of the Subaru at the front porch where Hannah stood with her arms crossed over her chest.
“Think about what you’re doing, Hannah,” he said, his voice small and pathetic in the cold morning air. “Once you cross Mom, there’s no coming back. You’ll be out of the will. Both of us will.”
“Drive safe, Ryan,” Hannah said, and turned her back on him before he could answer.
The sound of his engine fading down Maple Street was the best Christmas present she had received in six years.
Inside, Ellie was still asleep in her dinosaur pajamas, dreaming of sugar cookies and Santa Claus. Hannah sat back down at the kitchen table, picked up her cold coffee, and stared at the phone lying beside the sugar bowl.
At 9:15 AM, the phone rang again.
It wasn’t Ryan. And it wasn’t Judith.
It was Frank.
“Hannah?” his voice was sharp, urgent, cutting through the background noise of what sounded like an engine idling in an open garage.
“I’m here, Frank.”
“Ryan just got back to the house,” Frank said, his breathing heavy as if he had just jogged up the basement stairs. “Judith is standing in the foyer right now handing out gift envelopes to Paige and Scott. She told everyone you were throwing a tantrum and decided to stay home because you couldn’t handle family standards.”
“I’m sure she did,” Hannah said calmly.
“Well, she’s about to change her tune,” Frank muttered darkly. “Because I just called Arthur Vance.”
Hannah blinked. Arthur Vance was the senior partner at Vance, Miller & Gable—the oldest probate and real estate law firm in Warren County. He was also the man who had drafted Judith’s family trust back in 1998, back when the brick house on Canterbury Lane was still mortgaged to the hilt.
“Frank... what did you do?”
“I didn’t do anything yet,” Frank said, a grim, humorless chuckle escaping his throat. “I just reminded Arthur that the Canterbury Lane property was deeded jointly under the family trust—a trust that requires unanimous consent from both trustees to mortgage, transfer, or alter any parcel of land or commercial holding attached to the family estate.”
A sudden, sharp realization hit Hannah like a dash of cold water. “The commercial lot on Route 4.”
“The commercial lot,” Frank confirmed. “The one Judith has been trying to sell to the car dealership developers for eight hundred thousand dollars behind my back so she can renovate the sunroom and build that indoor lap pool she’s wanted since 2010. She needs my signature as co-trustee. And she needs my consent as co-owner.”
May you like
Frank paused, and for the first time in six years, Hannah heard the absolute, unyielding authority of a man who had finally decided to stop hiding in his basement workshop.
“She thinks she controls this family because she holds the purse strings,” Frank said softly. “She forgot who actually holds the deed.”
