Chapter 8 - The MeetingPatricia set the meeting for a Tuesday morning in a conference room with a view of the harbor, though from the eighth floor, the water looked distant and manageable in a way it never had standing on the dock.
Marcus arrived with his own attorney, a sharp, unsmiling man named Frank Dellucci, whose expression suggested he already understood he'd been handed a difficult case. Marcus himself looked thinner than I remembered, though it had only been three weeks. He avoided my eyes when he sat down, which told me more than anything Frank Dellucci was about to say.
Patricia opened with the estate account withdrawals. Julian's forensic report. The three forged marina authorizations. The falsified power of attorney document. The unlicensed charter business. The line of credit opened without my knowledge or signature.
Then she opened Carla's folder.
I watched Marcus's face change in real time, the particular stillness of a man watching a door he thought he'd sealed permanently swing open again from the other side.
"This is a completely separate matter," Frank Dellucci said quickly, "with no relevance to—"
"It's extremely relevant," Patricia said, calm and precise, "to demonstrate a documented pattern of financial fraud extending back at least two years, which speaks directly to intent, which will matter significantly if this proceeds to criminal referral rather than remaining strictly civil."
The word criminal landed in the room like a stone dropped into still water.
Marcus finally looked at me. "Diane," he said, and his voice had lost its earlier register of managed control, sounding instead almost young, almost afraid. "Please. Whatever you want — the boat, the house, I'll sign anything. Just don't make this criminal. Think about Mia. Think about what this would do to her, watching her father—"
"Mia already knows," I said. "She unfollowed the Instagram account herself, once she understood what it actually was. She's not confused about who did what here, Marcus. Only you seem to be confused about that."
He flinched.
"Here is what I want," I said, and I'd rehearsed this part with Patricia the night before, wanting my own voice to carry it rather than letting her carry it for me. "Full transfer of the Wanderlust back into my sole name, with all liens and unauthorized charges against it resolved by you, personally, not the estate. Repayment of the thirty-one thousand from the estate account, plus the twelve thousand from the fraudulent line of credit, with interest, on a schedule Patricia and your attorney will negotiate. Full and immediate dissolution of the WanderlustCharters account and any related business registration. And a formal, written acknowledgment — not for the court, for me — that the authorization documents were forged, not 'signed on my behalf,' as you keep insisting on calling it."
"And if I do all of that?"
"Then I won't pursue criminal referral," I said. "Yet. But Carla's information stays with Patricia's office. If I ever hear you've done this to someone else — invested their trust, forged their name, built another quiet second life on someone else's money — that changes immediately."
Frank Dellucci leaned toward Marcus, murmuring something too low for me to hear. Marcus's jaw worked silently for a long moment.
"Okay," he said finally, so quietly I almost missed it. "Okay. All of it."
I felt, for the first time in three weeks, something that wasn't quite relief but was adjacent to it — the particular, hard-won calm of a person who has stopped waiting for someone else to admit the truth and has simply made the truth undeniable instead.
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Patricia began outlining the timeline for the formal paperwork, and I sat back in my chair and looked out at the harbor, eight floors below, and thought about my father, and the Wanderlust, and the strange, unexpected relief of finally, finally being believed — by lawyers, by documents, by numbers that didn't lie the way people sometimes did.
It wasn't over. But it was, for the first time, moving in the right direction.
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