Hullbrook’s finger slid down the page. “And then,” she said, “we come to dispositions regarding the controlling interest in Brennan Holt International and certain ancillary assets.”
The air changed. The board members straightened.
One of the suits beside my daughter—General Counsel, if I remembered right—stopped tapping his pen. Victoria didn’t move. She didn’t have to.
She’d grown up in this oxygen. “Per Mrs. Brennan’s instructions,” Hullbrook read, “I will summarize, then we’ll review the schedule in detail.”
She turned another page in the blue folder.
It felt like watching a judge load a rifle. “First,” she said, “specific bequests.” She rattled off a list—Margaret’s sister in Dublin, a scholarship to her old university, a fund for the children’s hospital wing with her name already carved above it. Numbers that would have stunned anyone in my world.
Here they were bullet points. I sat and listened to the woman I used to know turned into line items. “And now,” Hullbrook said, “we come to dispositive Clause Eleven.” Her gaze flicked up over the folder.
“Regarding residual assets, including but not limited to real property, liquid accounts, and the one-hundred-eighty-five-million-dollar controlling share block of Brennan Holt International.”
The room went silent in a new way. Greedy. Afraid.
Victoria’s hand tightened on the arm of her chair. Just once. The only tell.
“Subject to the conditions that follow,” Hullbrook read, “I bequeath my residuary estate as follows: fifty percent to the Margaret E. Brennan Charitable Foundation, established contemporaneously with this will… and fifty percent to be divided between my daughter, Victoria Anne Brennan—”
Of course. “—and my former husband, Thomas James Brennan.”
The words dropped into the room like a glass smashed on marble.
I didn’t understand them at first. It was like hearing my name in a dream—recognizable, but not attached to reality. Then the echo hit.
“And my former husband…”
Every head turned toward me. The suits. The cousins.
The two board members I recognized from old photographs and ugly meetings. Even the receptionist in the corner pretending not to listen. Victoria jolted like a wire had been attached to her spine.
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