Vivian, my father said. He’d noticed. She didn’t respond. Brooke finally stopped talking. She looked between us. What is that? A filing, I said. What kind of filing? The kind that gets hand delivered.
Walt Gruber cleared his throat. Mr. Vane, we really should. Two minutes, I said. He nodded once and stepped back. My father’s voice dropped to the register he used when he wanted to sound controlled. Daniel. Whatever you think you’re doing, this is not the place. You’re right, I said. It probably should have happened in a conference room. Or a courtroom. But you canceled the mediation and your attorneys stopped responding, so. I shrugged.
Brooke took a step toward me. You’re bluffing. I handed her page seven. She looked at it. Her eyes moved down the page. Stopped somewhere in the middle. She handed it back without saying anything. That was new.
Then my father laughed. Not the nervous laugh from before. Something harder. The laugh he used on subordinates who brought him problems he didn’t want to hear. You’ve been busy, he said. I have. And you think this, he gestured at the file, does what exactly? Embarrasses us? We have lawyers, Daniel. We’ve always had lawyers. I know, I said. I’ve read all their correspondence.
He stopped rocking. The offshore accounts are the easy part, I said. The forged signatures are harder to explain. Especially when the forensic analysis shows the forgeries were done on a tablet registered to a device account under Brooke’s name.
Brooke’s head came up. That’s not. I know, I said. I know you didn’t do it yourself. I know whose handwriting it actually is. I looked at my father. I know a lot of things I didn’t know two years ago.
The gate agent behind the counter had stopped pretending to work. A couple in matching fleece jackets had drifted closer than they probably realized. Walt Gruber touched his earpiece again.
My mother finally spoke. What do you want, she said. Not I’m sorry. Not how did it come to this. Just, what do you want. Which was honest, at least. More honest than anything she’d said to me in eight years.
The thing about spending two years building a case against your own family is that you have a lot of time to think about the answer to that question. What did I want. I didn’t want the company. I’d never wanted the company. That was always Brooke’s thing, and before Brooke it was supposed to be my older cousin Randall, who had the good sense to take a buyout at thirty two and move to Portugal. I didn’t want an apology. Not a real one, anyway. The Ellison family didn’t do apologies that cost them anything.
What I wanted was simple. My name off the documents I never signed. A legal separation of my financial history from whatever came next for Ellison Capital. And the return of the three hundred forty thousand dollars that had been quietly siphoned from a profit sharing account my grandfather set up for me before he died, the one my father had managed as trustee and apparently managed right into a different account entirely. That was it. Not revenge. Not a scene in an airport. The scene in the airport was, genuinely, a coincidence. I was flying to D.C. for a meeting with the oversight attorneys. My family was flying to Miami for reasons I didn’t care about. O’Hare is a big airport and also a small one, depending on the terminal, and we ended up in the same security lane because the universe occasionally has a sense of timing. The press advisory going out early, that was someone else’s doing. An assistant somewhere who hit send before they should have. The rest of it just happened.
My mother pulled my father aside. Their conversation lasted about ninety seconds. I didn’t watch it. Walt walked me to the private security lane, the one that bypasses the main checkpoint. One of his officers carried the briefcase. Behind me, I heard Brooke say something to my father. I didn’t catch the words. I didn’t look back.
The gate for my flight was quiet. A handful of business travelers, a woman asleep across two seats with a coat over her face. I sat down and opened my laptop and pulled up the email thread with the oversight attorneys and started reading where I’d left off. My phone buzzed. Brooke. I let it go to voicemail. It buzzed again. My father. Then my mother. I put the phone face down on the seat beside me and looked out the window at the gray Chicago morning, the tarmac wet and the sky the color of old concrete, a baggage cart moving slowly in the distance.
