Chapter 6: What the Process Server Carried
I watched from the window as Marcus took the document.
He read the first page.
Then the second.
His head came up and he looked back at the house — directly at the window where I was standing.
I didn't step back.
He said something to the man in the dark coat.
The man shrugged, got back in his car, and drove away.
Marcus stood in the drive for a long moment, the papers in his hand, the morning wind moving through his jacket.
Then he got in his car.
I moved away from the window and went to the kitchen.
I filled the kettle.
I found a clean mug.
Small, deliberate actions.
The kind that keep you upright.
My phone rang.
Mr.
Hargrove.
"He's been served," the lawyer said.
"I saw."
"The petition covers the marital asset review, the paternity rights framework, and the formal notice that the trust is not subject to matrimonial claims under the terms of the prenuptial agreement."
I set the mug on the counter.
"He signed the prenuptial agreement the week before our wedding.
He told me it was just a formality."
"Most people who sign documents they haven't read say that afterward," Mr.
Hargrove said.
"His attorney will tell him the same thing I'm telling you.
There is no viable claim.
The trust is airtight.
Your father made certain of that."
"What will he do?"
"He'll look for leverage," the lawyer said.
"He'll go through everything he can remember — conversations, decisions, anything where he can argue he was misled or that the trust was used improperly.
He won't find anything.
But he'll look."
"Let him look," I said.
"There is one thing," Mr.
Hargrove said.
His voice shifted slightly.
"His mother called my office this morning.
Before I'd even arrived."
I set the kettle down.
"Diane called you?"
"She wanted to know if there was any way to have the trust reviewed on the grounds that Edmund had diminished capacity when he established it."
The water had boiled.
Steam rose from the kettle spout.
"My father established that trust nineteen years ago," I said.
"He was fifty-two years old and in perfect health."
"I told her as much.
She was not receptive."
"What does Diane want?"
"I believe," Mr.
Hargrove said carefully, "that she wants what she has always wanted.
To be relevant to the money."
Diane.
Marcus's mother.
The woman who had called me *the bookkeeper* at every family dinner for four years and laughed when Marcus laughed and looked at my father's house like she was calculating its square footage.
"Can she do anything?" I asked.
"Not legally.
But she may try to do things that aren't legal." A pause.
"I want you to be careful, Elena.
Marcus losing the house is one thing.
Diane losing access to what she thought Marcus had — that is something else entirely."
I looked at Eleanor, asleep in the bassinet I'd moved to the kitchen doorway so I could see her while I made tea.
"How careful?" I asked.
"Change the gate code today," he said.
"And call me if she contacts you directly."
I said I would.
I ended the call.
The tea went cold while I stood at the counter thinking about Diane — her sharp smile, the way she'd touched the furniture in this house like she was appraising it, the Christmas she'd told Marcus he'd *married well* and winked at him over my head.
Marcus had laughed.
I had refilled her glass and said nothing.
I went to the gate panel by the back door and changed the code.
Then I sat down at my father's desk, opened my laptop, and began to work through the list of things that needed to happen in the next seventy-two hours.
Account notifications.
HR communications for the company.
A call to the Singapore office, where the expansion director had been my father's contact first and would need to hear my voice before he'd trust the change in authority.
I was three items down the list when my phone lit up.
Not a call.
A text.
From a number I didn't recognize.
*You think you've won.
You don't know what Marcus told me about you.
About the baby.
About what your father really did with that company.
Meet me or I go to the press.*
I read it twice.
Then I screenshot it and forwarded it to Mr.
May you like
Hargrove with one line:
*It's already starting.*
