Chapter 4
Jason had been slowly poisoning the trust's medical reporting for three months, paying off the attending physician to suppress documentation of Ethan's improving brain activity, because a board vote on permanent guardianship was scheduled for the week after Ethan's thirtieth birthday — a vote that would transfer full operational control to Jason if Ethan remained legally incapacitated, marriage or no marriage. The wedding had never been the actual threat to Jason's plan. It had been camouflage. Something for the family to focus on while the real maneuver happened quietly through a captured doctor and a falsified neurological report.
I spent those six weeks doing what Emma Carter, three weeks out from a forced wedding, would never have believed she was capable of doing. I located Ethan's actual primary physician from before the captured doctor took over — a Dr. Patricia Ellison who had been removed from the case under murky circumstances four months earlier — and reached her quietly through a contact at my old job. I retained an attorney unconnected to the Thornton family's usual firm. I documented every visit, every conversation, every detail Ethan gave me, in a notebook I kept hidden inside a hollowed-out paperback in my room.
The board vote happened on a Thursday in March.
May you like
Jason stood to present his guardianship petition with the same casual confidence he'd worn the day I met him, and was three sentences into his opening statement when Ethan Thornton walked into the boardroom — slower than he used to walk, leaning slightly on a cane, but entirely, undeniably conscious — accompanied by Dr. Ellison and my attorney, who placed on the table a sworn affidavit from the captured physician, who had agreed to testify against Jason in exchange for reduced exposure on the falsification charges.
Jason's face went the particular shade of gray that belongs to men watching a plan collapse in real time in front of the only audience that matters.
