Chapter 10: What Everything Was Worth
The legal process took four months.
Charles's attorneys fought, as he had promised they would.
They filed motions, requested continuances, challenged the handwriting analysis, and attempted twice to have Grace's testimony excluded on procedural grounds.
Both attempts failed.
The forged consent form was the piece that mattered most.
Corporate fraud involving falsified filings was not something that could be quietly settled.
The Massachusetts Attorney General's office opened an inquiry six weeks after Diane filed the initial complaint.
Charles's lead attorney — the one who had sent the email about the valuation — resigned from the firm before the inquiry concluded.
I was present the morning Charles's deposition was taken.
I sat across the table from him in a conference room in Boston, and I watched him answer questions for four hours in the same controlled, careful voice he had always used.
But the control was different now.
It was the control of a man managing fear, not confidence.
Diane leaned over to me at one point and said quietly, "He knows how this ends."
The settlement agreement was voided by the court.
A new agreement was negotiated over six weeks, with both legal teams present and every material document on the table.
The final figure was one hundred and eighty million dollars — not the full two hundred and thirty, but a number that reflected what the valuation had established and what the fraud had cost.
The non-disclosure clause was not included.
The board shares were restored to nineteen percent, pending my decision about whether I wished to retain them.
I told Diane I would think about it.
Charles avoided a criminal charge on the fraud count by agreeing to a financial penalty and a formal censure from the state corporate registry.
His attorney negotiated that outcome.
I did not oppose it.
I had not come back to Boston to destroy him.
I had come back because what he took from me was mine, and I wanted it returned.
Phoebe Bennett had her twins in November — two girls, healthy, delivered at a private hospital in Cambridge.
The paternity arrangement was eventually disclosed publicly when Robert Ashworth filed his own legal claim.
That story ran in three financial publications and one national newspaper.
I had nothing to do with that.
I had not mentioned Phoebe's name to anyone outside the legal process.
I thought about her sometimes.
A twenty-six-year-old who had made her own calculations and found herself inside a situation that was larger and more complicated than she had anticipated.
I did not feel sorry for her in the way I once might have.
But I did not feel anger either.
She was not the architect of what had been done to me.
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Charles was.
And Charles was living, now, with the specific and named consequences of that.
