Chapter 6: The Call Marcus Made
Dominic left Natalie's room twenty minutes later with three pages of notes on his phone — dates, conversations, specific things Brooke had said, specific things she had asked Natalie to sign or agree to or simply believe.
He went to the study and called his attorney.
"I need everything you have on Marcus Harrington's acquisition attempts.
All three holding companies.
Every offer, every intermediary, every contact name." He sat down at the desk.
"And I need you to pull the Catherine Mercer trust documents.
All of them.
I want to know if there's been any contact between the trust executor and anyone connected to the Harrington family."
A pause on the line.
"Richard Hale?"
"Yes."
Another pause.
Longer.
"Dominic.
If Hale has been compromised—"
"Then I need to know before anyone files anything or contacts anyone else.
How quickly can you be here?"
"I'm already on the road.
Forty minutes."
"Good."
He ended the call and sat back.
The study was quiet.
Rain had started again, lighter this time, tapping against the window glass.
On the desk in front of him was a framed photograph — his mother at the cottage, summer, laughing at something outside the frame.
He had put it there years ago and stopped seeing it the way you stop seeing things that have always been there.
He looked at it now.
A knock at the study door.
"Come in."
It was Emma.
She had a folded piece of paper in her hand.
"I wrote down what I told you.
And I added something I forgot to mention."
He took the paper.
"Two months ago, Brooke asked me to give her access to the household calendar.
The full one — staff schedules, your travel dates, Natalie's appointments." Emma stood with her hands clasped in front of her.
"I told her I'd need to check with you first.
She said it was a future-household-management matter and that you'd already approved it."
"I hadn't."
"I know.
I didn't give her access.
But she found it another way.
Through one of the newer staff members.
A young man named Peter who started in February."
Dominic looked up.
"He gave her the calendar?"
"He didn't know what he was doing.
She asked him to help her sync the household system to her phone.
He thought it was a normal request." Emma's voice was careful.
"But she's had your full travel schedule since February.
Every trip.
Every date.
Every time you were away from the property."
The room was quiet.
Every time you were away from the property.
Every dinner with Natalie.
Every conversation with the staff.
Every document slipped across a table at five in the morning.
Every visit from Gerald Foss.
She had known, each time, exactly how long she had.
"Where is Peter now?" Dominic asked.
"In the kitchen.
He has no idea he did anything wrong."
"Don't tell him.
Don't change anything." Dominic folded Emma's paper and put it in his jacket pocket.
"I don't want Brooke to know what we know."
Emma nodded.
"Is she still in the house?"
"Her car is still out front.
She's in the master bedroom.
She's made two phone calls in the last hour."
"To Marcus?"
"The first one, yes.
The second one I don't know."
Dominic stood up.
"The second one worries me more," he said.
He was right to be worried.
Because forty minutes later, when his attorney arrived and they sat down together in the study with the trust documents spread across the desk, his attorney looked up from a single page and said, very quietly:
"There's an amendment here."
Dominic leaned forward.
"This amendment was filed eight weeks ago." His attorney turned the page toward him.
"It adds a co-executor to the trust.
Someone with equal authority to approve or block any distributions."
Dominic read the name on the page.
He read it twice.
"That signature," he said.
"Yes."
"That's my signature."
"Yes."
"I never signed this."
His attorney looked at him steadily.
"I know."
The rain against the window was the only sound in the room.
Someone had forged Dominic Mercer's signature on a legal amendment to his mother's trust.
And that amendment had given a second person the power to freeze Noah's inheritance entirely.
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The second name on the document was not Brooke Harrington.
It was Richard Hale.
