Chapter 3: The Ghost in the Study
With the house empty of the people who had poisoned it, I retreated to my father’s old study. It was a room I had been forbidden to enter for years—Mom always claimed it was "too messy" or "private."
Now that I owned the place, I unlocked it.
The room smelled of old paper and pipe tobacco. On the desk lay a journal. I opened it to the last entry, dated two months before he passed.
Hannah, the entry read. If you are reading this, I hope you finally see the truth. Margaret and Chloe have been bleeding me dry. Not just financially, but emotionally. They viewed you as the competition—the one who actually succeeded on her own merit, the one who didn't need to manipulate to be loved. I couldn't stop them from hurting you while I was alive, but I made sure they couldn't take your future from you.
I sat in the leather chair and wept. For years, I had believed the narrative that I was the "estranged" one, the one who left for college and abandoned the family. In reality, they had been building a fortress around me, cutting off communication, creating false dramas to keep me away so they could hoard my father’s affection and assets.
I found bank statements in the desk drawer. They had been draining his accounts for years, funding Chloe’s lifestyle and my mother’s vanity projects, all while telling me he was "financially struggling" whenever I called to check in.
They weren't just mean-spirited; they were thieves.
The anger I felt wasn't hot and impulsive anymore. It was cold, calculated, and sharp. I didn't want revenge in the form of a shouting match. I wanted justice. I called Robert Miller back.
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"They stole from him, Robert," I said. "Can we prove it?"
"I've been waiting for you to find those files, Hannah," he replied. "I have a forensic accountant ready to go. If they want to play dirty with their 'inheritance,' we can show them exactly how much they already took."
