Chapter 4 - The Aftermath in Rhode IslandThe ambulance arrived ten minutes after I made it to the venue parking lot. I had sat on the stone curb with Maisie, wrapping my coat around her shoulders while the cool autumn air swept in off the ocean.
At Newport Hospital, the emergency room team worked quickly. The news was as bad as I had feared. The impact had torn the surgical graft completely away from the bone, damaged the meniscus, and created a hairline fracture along the tibia. The orthopedic surgeon on call was grim.
“You’re looking at complete reconstruction, Ms. Vance,” he told me, pointing to the dark shadows on the X-ray monitor. “And at least six to eight months of intensive physical therapy. How did this happen?”
“I fell,” I said simply.
Sitting in the hospital room holding an ice pack to my knee, my phone began to buzz incessantly.
First came the texts from my mother:
Merritt, please call me. Your father is in a terrible state. You are breaking your mother's heart.
Sloan is hysterical. Thatcher left the estate and isn't answering his phone. How could you do this to your sister on her special weekend?
Then came the texts from my sister, escalating in rage:
You psychotic bitch. You did this on purpose because no one ever wanted to marry you.
If Thatcher cancels this wedding, I will make sure you lose everything. I will tell everyone what you are.
I didn't reply to a single message. Instead, I took screenshots of every text, saving them directly into a cloud folder labeled Vance Estate Litigation.
At 2:00 AM, my attorney, Rebecca Shaw, called my cell phone.
“Merritt? I just got a notification from the bank’s legal team,” Rebecca said, her tone sharp and precise. “Your father tried to execute a emergency override transfer of $45,000 to the estate caterers at midnight using an offshore line of credit backed by your grandfather’s trust.”
“Did it go through?” I asked, my heart pounding.
“No. Our temporary restraining order was logged with the banking network at 4:30 PM today. The system flagged it and locked all associated accounts globally. Judson is officially locked out of every dollar.”
I let out a long breath, leaning back against the uncomfortable hospital pillows.
“What happens now, Rebecca?”
“Now, the real work begins,” Rebecca replied. “Because when a trustee gets locked out of an account they’ve been secretly draining, they start making desperate mistakes. And your father just made his first one.”
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“What mistake?”
“He used his personal email to send a demand letter to the trust bank, claiming that you are mentally incompetent and that he had 'implied power of attorney' over your share. He signed it under penalty of perjury.” Rebecca chuckled dryly. “Merritt, that isn't just civil fraud anymore. That’s a federal banking crime.”
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