“My mother lived for that foundation,” I said, my voice shaking despite my best efforts to keep it still. “She would never have taken a single dime.”

“What she did or did not do is irrelevant now,” Thomas replied.

He opened the leather-bound notebook, turning it so I could see a photocopy of a bank transfer authorization.

At the bottom of the page was my mother’s signature, written in her distinctive, elegant cursive.

Beside it was a routing number for an account in the Cayman Islands.

“This is a forgery,” I whispered, though my eyes locked onto the ink.

“It is a very good one,” Thomas said, his mouth twitching into a slight, humorless smile. “Good enough that the federal auditors won’t know the difference.”

He closed the notebook with a soft, decisive thud.

“If you press forward with the injunction against Hartwell House tomorrow, this notebook goes to the press and the authorities,” he said.

“You would drag a dead woman’s name through the mud just to save your family’s real estate firm?” I asked.

“I would do far worse to protect the Hartwell legacy,” Thomas said.