Chapter 2 - Flynn Celebrates Before Reading The Deed
Two weeks after Sloan fell down fourteen hardwood steps, Flynn Vale
raised a champagne glass inside the lake house and told forty guests
that the divorce had finally taught his wife a lesson.
Cordelia stood beside him beneath the chandelier, smiling like the
estate had always belonged to her.
Sloan was not there.
Her leg remained in a cast, her shoulder strapped in a brace, and every
movement reminded her what had happened on the staircase.
But from Phoebe Grant’s law office, Sloan watched the transfer become
final.
Phoebe placed the recorded deed on the table.
“He accepted everything.”
Sloan looked at the signature.
Flynn Vale.
No coercion.
No reservation.
No attempt to separate the house from the covenants attached to it.
“Did he read Schedule C?”
Phoebe almost smiled.
“He initialed it.”
Schedule C was thirty-eight pages long.
Flynn apparently believed it contained ordinary environmental
restrictions connected to the lakefront property.
It did not.
Sloan’s grandfather, Augustus Mercer, had purchased the land forty years
earlier.
Twenty years ago, he placed the estate inside an unusual property
structure.
The mansion could be transferred.
The lakefront could be transferred.
But one subterranean parcel beneath the western wing could never be
separated from ownership of the estate.
Whoever accepted the house also accepted legal custodianship of whatever
remained inside that parcel.
Flynn had just accepted it.
Cordelia had spent years believing Augustus hid gold beneath the
mansion.
She was wrong.
The underground chamber did contain something valuable.
But its value was not measured in gold.
Phoebe opened Augustus’s sealed instructions.
The first line read:
WHEN A NEW OWNER ACCEPTS THE ESTATE, NOTIFY THE MERCER RESTITUTION
TRUST.
Sloan stared at it.
She had seen the words before.
She still did not know everything they meant.
Phoebe turned the page.
A second instruction appeared.
THE CUSTODIAN HAS THIRTY DAYS TO OPEN VAULT FOUR.
Sloan looked up.
“What happens if Flynn refuses?”
Phoebe’s expression changed.
“He can’t keep the house and refuse the vault.”
For the first time since the staircase, Sloan smiled.
May you like
Flynn thought she had surrendered five million dollars.
What she had actually given him was a deadline.
