He Called My Inheritance a Forgery in Front of Three Hundred Guests, Then Took Every Blow Meant for Me novel · Chapter 15 of 40

Chapter 15: Table Four

I stayed on my knees on the bare floor.

"Forty days," I said.

"Thirty-nine, now. It's after midnight."

"Why does it go to Leonard? Why not just to the bank, or to court, or whatever happens when somebody misses a payment?"

Kendrick rubbed his face with both hands.

"Because your father didn't read the loan," he said. "Or he read it and didn't think he'd ever die."

He reached down and took a folded paper out of the cardboard box.

It was a page from a contract, photocopied so many times the letters were furry.

One paragraph was circled in red pen.

"Read it," he said.

I read it.

Twice.

If the borrower's shares pass to any person other than the operating partner, the full balance becomes due within thirty days, and the lender may take the shares in settlement.

"The operating partner," I said.

"Me."

"So if the shares go to you, the payments just keep going."

"On schedule. Which I can make. Barely."

"And if they go to anybody else."

"Thirty days. Four million. Or Leonard takes the shares."

I looked up at him.

"That's why he changed the will," I said. "In July."

"He found the clause in June, reading it at two in the morning in his study. He called me up there and showed me."

"He was white as a sheet."

"So he left it all to you."

"So he left the debt to me," Kendrick said. "The company came with it."

I sat back on my heels.

Then I understood the rest of it, all at once.

"The August will," I said.

He nodded.

"It leaves everything to me."

"Which starts the thirty days."

"And nobody on earth has four million dollars in thirty days."

"Leonard forged it," Kendrick said. "He made you the heir so you'd lose it. You'd have been the owner of Harrow Hill for one month."

"Then a man in a camel coat would have walked up the drive with a piece of paper, and it would have been his."

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