Chapter 5
Two days after the court hearing, news of the court-ordered forensic audit broke in the local business daily newspaper. The headline wasn't front-page news, but in the tight-knit commercial design circles of our city, it was a massive bombshell: Local Design Firm Named in Trust Fund Investigation.
The fallout was instantaneous.
Megan’s high-profile corporate clients began pulling their contracts one by one. Nobody wanted to be associated with an interior designer whose business foundation was currently being investigated by the county district attorney for illegal trust funding.
I was at my office desk on Thursday afternoon when my phone rang. It was an unfamiliar local number.
"Tina?"
It was Dad. His voice sounded hollow, stripped of all the authority and arrogance he had carried for decades.
"Dad?" I said cautiously. "You shouldn't be calling me directly. Marcus said all communications should go through the attorneys."
"Please don't hang up, Tina," he rasped. "I'm not calling to fight. I'm calling because... because Megan locked me out."
I paused, setting my pen down on the desk. "What do you mean locked you out?"
"She came to the house last night," Dad explained, his breathing heavy. "She blamed me for losing her corporate clients. She said I ruined her life by being sloppy with the bank records. She took the spare house keys, cleared out her accounting files from my home office, and said she was liquidating her company assets before the court could freeze them."
I felt a cold sensation settle in my stomach. "Did she take money from your primary accounts too?"
"My retirement checking account is empty, Tina," Dad sobbed quietly over the line. "There was forty thousand dollars in there. She had power of attorney on that account from three years ago when I had my hip surgery. She transferred all of it into her business operating fund this morning."
I sat back in my desk chair, stunned.
Megan hadn't just been a passive beneficiary of Dad's favoritism; she had actively drained him the moment the walls started closing in. She was sacrificing our father to save herself.
"Where are you right now, Dad?" I asked softly.
"I'm at the house," he replied, weeping openly now. "The heating system stopped working this morning, and I don't have enough money in my account to pay the service call fee. I'm sitting in the kitchen with a coat on, Tina. I don't know what to do."
I looked at the framed photo of Emma sitting on my office desk. I remembered the three slaps across my face on Christmas Day. I remembered the cold contempt in Dad's eyes when he called me a parasite.
Part of me wanted to say that this was the consequence of his own actions. Part of me wanted to hang up and let him deal with the monster he had created in Megan.
May you like
But as I stared at the photo of my daughter, I realized that if I let him freeze in that house alone, I wouldn't be any better than the people who had hurt us.
"Stay there," I told him quietly. "I'll be there in twenty minutes."
