Chapter 6 - The Brother's Retreat
Miles Whitman did not look like a successful entrepreneur when I saw him two days later at the corporate offices of Calder Environmental. He looked like a man who had spent forty-eight hours sleeping in his clothes. He had burst into the executive boardroom where I sat with Marcus Vance, our family’s longtime legal counsel and the trustee of my grandmother’s estate.
"Claire!" Miles shouted, slamming his palms onto the glass table. "You have to drop the civil injunction! The bank just locked the operating capital for the lounge! I can't even pay the contractors for the kitchen remodel!"
"The operating capital for your lounge was pulled from a forged line of credit secured against my Pearl District property, Miles," I said, sliding a ledger of fraudulent loan applications toward him. "Mom didn't just burn my apartment to destroy evidence; she used a fake signature stamp to authorize a two-million-dollar construction loan using my house as collateral. And you signed as the co-guarantor."
Miles went white, his fingers curling into fists. "I didn't know it was fake! Mom told me you agreed to it! She said you wanted to help me!"
"You didn't care enough to check, Miles," Marcus Vance said, his voice dropping like an anvil. "You were perfectly content to let your sister live in a burning building as long as your lounge got its Italian marble counters. As the trustee of the Calder estate, I have already initiated a summary forfeiture of your remaining shares in the family distribution firm to cover the loan damages."
"Forfeiture?" Miles gasped, looking at me as if I were a stranger. "Claire... we're siblings. You can't leave me with nothing. I owe people money downtown. Real people. If the lounge fails, I'm ruined."
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"You were ruined the moment you allowed our mother to treat me like an inconvenience while you bled our grandmother's hard work dry," I said, closing my laptop. "You have twenty-four hours to vacate the lounge property before the court-ordered receiver takes possession of the equipment. If you want to help Mom with her bail, I suggest you sell your car."
He didn't yell. He didn't make a scene. He just sank into one of the executive chairs, his head in his hands, realizing too late that the sister he had spent his life ignoring was the only person who had actually kept the family from drowning.
