Chapter 10 - The Groom Disappeared
Lucas did not answer his phone.
My father did not know where he was.
My mother claimed she did not care.
That meant she cared very much.
At nine-fifteen, Alexander’s security team located Lucas’s car outside Bennett Manufacturing.
We drove there together.
The factory was twenty minutes outside the city.
I had visited it hundreds of times as a child.
My grandfather used to give me safety goggles and let me stand behind a yellow line while machines shaped pieces of metal.
Lucas hated the noise.
I loved it.
That memory felt strangely important now.
We found Lucas in my father’s office.
The box sat open on the desk.
Documents covered the floor.
He looked as though he had aged overnight.
“I needed to know.”
My father entered behind us.
“Know what?”
Lucas held up a ledger.
“How much of this company actually belongs to Emily?”
My mother arrived minutes later.
Nobody had invited her.
She walked into the office furious.
“Give me that.”
Lucas pulled the ledger away.
“No.”
Her face changed.
He had never denied her anything so directly.
She tried again.
“You have a wedding in six hours.”
Lucas laughed bitterly.
“Do I?”
My mother stared at him.
He pointed at the ledger.
“You transferred Grandma’s shares to me.”
“For the family.”
“You forged Emily’s signature.”
“To stabilize ownership.”
“You used her trust to rescue my company.”
“I rescued you.”
Lucas slammed the ledger onto the desk.
“That’s the problem.”
Everyone went silent.
“You never let me fail.”
His voice cracked.
“You never even let me know I was failing.”
My mother looked stunned.
Lucas turned toward me.
“And every time you rescued me, you took something from Emily.”
I had waited my whole life to hear someone in my family say it.
It did not feel victorious.
It felt sad.
Lucas opened another folder.
“I found emails.”
My mother’s face drained.
“What emails?”
“Between you and Uncle Thomas.”
Thomas was my mother’s older brother.
I barely knew him.
He had moved to Arizona years earlier.
Lucas handed the pages to Alexander.
Alexander read silently.
Then he looked at me.
My mother moved toward the papers.
“Those are private.”
Alexander stepped aside.
“They concern Emily.”
I took them.
The emails were dated seven years earlier.
Three weeks before my grandmother died.
My mother had been trying to have Margaret declared mentally incompetent.
Not because my grandmother could not manage her affairs.
Because she had discovered irregularities in the trust.
My grandmother had found the first unauthorized withdrawal.
She had threatened to remove my mother as trustee.
The final email made my blood run cold.
My mother wrote:
If Margaret speaks to Emily before Friday, everything collapses.
I looked at her.
“What happened Friday?”
Nobody answered.
My father slowly sat down.
I turned toward him.
“Dad?”
His voice was almost inaudible.
“Friday was the day your grandmother changed her medical power of attorney.”
A chill moved through me.
“To whom?”
May you like
My father looked at Catherine.
“To your mother.”
