Then publicly reveal them at our home.
The goal was simple.
Destroy our marriage.
Trigger the settlement.
Get my signature.
And remove me from Rowan Meridian.
But why?
Why would the trustee my father had appointed want to remove me from the company my father had arranged for me to control?
The answer arrived inside a safe-deposit box.
Vale had disappeared.
But federal investigators found records showing that for nearly twenty years, he had quietly moved money from my father’s trust through offshore accounts.
Not millions.
Hundreds of millions.
If I remained controlling shareholder and ordered the forensic audit I had recentlybegun, eventually I would discover it.
So Vale needed me gone.
He needed Evan disgraced.
He needed Margaret desperate.
And he needed chaos large enough to hide everything.
Leah’s fake twins were not a romantic scheme.
They were corporate warfare.
But that still wasn’t the final secret.
Not even close.
Three weeks later, I received a package.
No return address.
Inside was a letter written in my father’s handwriting.
I recognized it immediately.
The letter began:
Claire, if you are reading this, Richard has finally become afraid of you.
My hands started shaking.
My father explained everything.
He had discovered Vale’s theft years earlier.
He planned to remove him.
But before he could, he became ill.
Cancer.
Aggressive.
Terminal.
He feared Vale had compromised people inside the company.
So he created the fifty-one-percent trust structure specifically to protect me.
Then came the paragraph that changed everything.
I never poisoned Evan.I stopped breathing.
The letter continued.
My father knew Evan had been poisoned.
He knew Margaret suspected him.
And he allowed her to believe it.
Why?
Because the real culprit was too dangerous to expose without proof.
According to my father, Evan’s toxic exposure had begun during his father’s final years running Rowan Meridian.
At the time, the company was collapsing under debt.
Evan had discovered suspicious transfers.
Transfers connected to Richard Vale.
Vale feared Evan would expose him before the merger could save the company.
So he poisoned Evan gradually.
