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.
“No,” she said. It wasn’t loud. It didn’t have to be.
It sounded like every slammed door she’d ever survived. “That is what the will states,” Hullbrook said calmly. “I’ll continue with the provisions.”
“No, I mean—” Victoria’s composure cracked.
Her voice picked up a raw edge I hadn’t heard since she was fourteen and I told her we were moving out. “This is a mistake. He was—”
“Charged,” I said quietly.
Every face swung back to me. “Charged,” I repeated. “Never convicted.
The prosecution dropped the case when your mother decided the company wouldn’t survive discovery.”
That wasn’t the headline people remembered. The photo had been enough. “Disgraced CFO.” “Embezzlement Scandal.” “Brennan Holt rocked by betrayal.” Nobody had bothered with the follow-up three years later when the DA quietly filed a motion to dismiss “in the interest of justice.”
Truth doesn’t trend.
Victoria was shaking her head like she could rattle the past loose. “This can’t be right,” she said to Hullbrook. “My mother would never give him—”
“Ms.
Brennan,” Hullbrook said, and there was iron under the professionalism now. “I drafted this will myself. I met with your mother half a dozen times.
She made her intentions extremely clear, and I have them recorded on video and audio. If you’d like to challenge it, we can talk about that later. For now, I need to finish reading.”
That shut the room up.
My ears rang. “…the residuary estate is to be divided equally between my daughter and my former husband,” she went on. “However, I impose the following conditions.”
Of course there were conditions.
Margaret didn’t do uncomplicated. “One: My Brennan Holt voting shares—comprising 51.3% of outstanding stock—are to be placed in a two-person voting trust for a term of ten years.”
Ten years. That was a lifetime in this world.
“The trustees of that voting trust will be my daughter, Ms. Victoria Brennan, and my former husband, Mr. Thomas Brennan.”
Air left the room.
“Any major decision—mergers, asset sales, CEO appointments, executive compensation packages, or foreign plant closures—will require joint agreement and signatures of both trustees.”
My stomach dropped. She hadn’t just left me money. She’d handed me back the detonator.
The story doesn’t end here — it continues on the next page to discover the rest 🔎👇
