Chapter 3 - The Video Everyone Watched
By breakfast the next morning, my sister had collected two million views. My face appeared on my phone beneath captions that described me as an unemployed heir, a disgraced trust-fund son, and—my personal favorite—a man whose father's dinner guests had voted him off the island. Someone had added circus music to the scrape of the chair.
I switched the phone off and went to Grandma's apartment. She lived in a smaller stone house on the edge of the Mercer estate, though "smaller" in my family meant it had only four bedrooms. She opened the door herself, wearing wool slippers and carrying a plate of toast she'd plainly forgotten to eat.
"You look like your mother when she was about to argue with your father," she said.
"Did Mom usually win?"
"Not always. She was still usually right."
Mr. Archer waited in the study. He had brought a canvas document case and the expression of a man who had spent years wishing he'd been braver. Grandma poured tea and ignored his offer to help, which told me she was angrier than I'd seen her in a long time.
"Before we start," Archer said, "your mother wasn't responsible for your father's behavior. Neither was I. But I did fail to contact you when questions arose about an investment trust she established. I was told doing so would damage your relationship with the family. I accepted that explanation for far too long."
He opened the case and showed me a copy of a signed trust agreement. My mother had owned an eighteen-percent nonvoting interest in Mercer Properties. Under the agreement, her interest was to be held for me until my thirtieth birthday, with Grandma as an independent trustee and strict restrictions on pledging the shares against company debt.
"I turned thirty last year," I said.
"Yes," Archer answered. "Your father has treated the shares as though they remained inside his control. Your grandmother recently requested an accounting. The documents she received contain transfers that require explanation."
I read the agreement twice. The language was dense, but the provision forbidding the shares from being used as loan collateral was not. There was a purported authorization bearing my name from a meeting I'd never attended.
"That's not my signature."
Archer nodded. "We have to establish that properly. I won't ask you to accept a conclusion simply because it fits what you fear about your father. I've arranged independent forensic review, and your grandmother has retained separate counsel."
My first impulse was to drive to the mansion and put the document in front of Gregory Mercer while the whole family watched. Perhaps I could ask Vanessa to film that dinner, too. Grandma seemed to recognize the thought.
"Your mother wanted you to have choices," she said. "Not a weapon you feel obliged to swing."
I set the papers down. "What do you want from me?"
"I want you to read everything. Then decide how to protect yourself without becoming like him."
At the office later, Maya found me staring at a screen full of numbers. She dropped two coffees beside my keyboard. "You were featured in a particularly ugly video," she said. "Congratulations on joining the internet. It's terrible here."
"Did you watch it?"
"The full thing. My cousin sent it before your sister clipped it shorter. A waiter near her table posted a different angle. I saved the link."
She showed me. In the longer recording, Grandma clearly asked Gregory to stop. Camille made her kitchen remark. I gave Grandma her photograph. My father mocked the workshop. Vanessa's viral version had removed everything that might explain why I was there, including the birthday flowers.
"I could release this," I said.
"You could," Maya answered. "But do you want a public argument with your sister, or do you want your life back? Those aren't the same thing."
We had a more immediate problem. LumenWorks was bidding to install safety-monitoring equipment at Saint Anne's expanded medical complex. One contractor involved in the redevelopment belonged to Mercer Properties, and the project overlapped with Harborline. I'd declared the family relationship months earlier. Now I worried any dispute with my father could compromise the bidding process.
We called the hospital's independent procurement officer and updated our disclosure. Maya suggested that I remove myself from direct contract discussions until outside counsel reviewed the conflict. I hated the idea. It was the biggest opportunity our company had ever earned, and I had worked toward it for years.
"If our work is good enough, it'll survive you not being in the room," she said. "That's why we built a company instead of a monument to Daniel Mercer."
She was right. I signed the recusal memorandum before lunch.
At two o'clock, Warren Kessler called. He was the banker who had sat at my father's dinner table, pretending not to see what happened. His tone was newly polite.
"Daniel, I didn't realize you were the Mercer associated with LumenWorks. We have a mutual connection through the hospital project."
"You recognized me last night."
A pause. "I did."
"Then why call now?"
"Because your father's latest financing package depends on assumptions about Harborline and the medical complex. I've begun reviewing those assumptions. And I'm concerned about what yesterday's dinner reveals concerning the judgment of the people asking us for money."
I resisted the pleasure of hearing him say it. "Don't make a lending decision because my father was cruel at dinner. Look at the engineering reports and the ownership records."
"That's exactly what I intend to do."
After we ended the call, Maya studied me. "That was either your most mature moment or evidence you need a vacation."
"Both might be true."
My phone lit up again. The first message came from Vanessa: YOU MADE DAD LOOK BAD BY WALKING OUT. FIX IT. The second came from Alice's attorney, asking for a meeting about documents his client had lawfully preserved.
May you like
Then a third arrived from an unfamiliar number, accompanied by a photograph of my mother's handwriting on an old engineering report. Beneath a circled warning she'd written: Ask Daniel to check this himself.
The date was three weeks before she died.
