Chapter 5
The board vote that had been scheduled to transfer control to Jason instead resulted in his removal from the company entirely, a referral to the district attorney's office for the falsified medical records and the attempted guardianship fraud, and a unanimous reaffirmation of Ethan's full capacity and control over the Thornton trust.
Vivian Thornton, who I had assumed throughout those six weeks was either complicit or simply indifferent, turned out to have suspected something was wrong with Jason's reporting for over a month and had been quietly running her own parallel investigation, which she shared with my attorney the week before the board vote without ever telling me she was doing it. She apologized to me afterward, in her clipped, unsentimental way, for not trusting me sooner with what she knew.
"I had to be certain you weren't part of it," she said. "You'll do" turned out to have been provisional the entire time, and I respected her more for the honesty of that than I would have for false warmth.
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My father's debts were cleared as agreed — that part of the arrangement, ironically the part built on the most cynical foundation, held exactly as promised, because Ethan insisted on honoring it regardless of how the marriage had begun.
Ethan and I did not annul the marriage.
