Chapter 3 - The Letter on the Floor
Back inside the wreckage of the private dining room, the silence was suffocating.
Waiters stood by the doors with brooms and mop buckets, unsure whether to intervene. Rosalie sat trembling in a corner chair, her expensive ivory suit ruined by deep purple wine stains.
"She's bluffing!" Rosalie raged, fanning herself frantically. "She's a common market vendor trying to save face after embarrassing us! Jeffrey, call the police and have her arrested for property damage!"
Gemma, however, had walked over to the overturned table. She picked up the thick legal envelope Hannah had left behind.
Across the front, printed in heavy black serif typography, was the corporate crest of Sterling Pacific Holdings.
Gemma's hands began to shake violently.
"Gemma, what is it?" Jeffrey demanded, rubbing his sore wrist. "Throw that garbage away!"
Gemma tore open the red wax seal, pulling out five pages of certified legal notices and deed registries.
"Oh my God..." Gemma whispered, her voice cracking.
"What does it say?!" Rosalie snapped.
"Sterling Pacific Holdings... it's the master landlord of our law firm's high-rise in Century City," Gemma stammered, her eyes scanning the dense legal clauses. "And... and this document is a certified notice of immediate commercial lease non-renewal for The Weaver Cardiovascular Center in La Jolla and Vance & Sterling LLP."
"What?!" Jeffrey yelled, snatching the papers from his wife's hands.
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The documents were signed by senior partner Arthur Sterling, with an attached corporate charter listing the sole beneficiary and managing shareholder of Sterling Pacific Holdings: Hannah Morales-Weaver.
The room spun around Jeffrey. His private medical practice—the clinic he had spent ten years boasting about to his colleagues—operated out of a building owned entirely by the sister-in-law he had just tried to strike.
