Chapter 3 - The protection plan
There was no red button.
No vault slamming shut.
No fifty-million-dollar alarm.
The protection plan consisted mostly of phone calls and documents.
Martin contacted my banks.
Not to freeze my daughters’ personal accounts.
He had no authority for that.
He revoked all remaining agency permissions over mine.
He notified the credit-card issuer that Denise’s expense card was canceled.
He sent a dispute notice concerning several household-account transfers we had already been reviewing.
He informed the Social Security Administration, through the channels my counsel had prepared, that I believed someone retained my Social Security card without permission and that I wanted my account access independently secured.
We did not change benefits by magic over the phone.
Identity verification followed.
Forms.
Appointments.
Bureaucracy.
Useful bureaucracy.
Martin also notified Hawthorne Trust Company.
That was where the real money lived.
The Eleanor and Henry Price Revocable Trust.
Estimated value that week:
$49.8 million.
I was grantor.
Current trustee.
Martin was trust counsel, not trustee.
Hawthorne served as investment custodian and would become successor corporate trustee if I resigned or lost capacity under the actual standards in the instrument.
While competent, I retained broad authority.
Invest.
Distribute.
Amend.
Revoke.
Change remainder beneficiaries within legal and contractual limits.
Give money away.
Keep it.
Spend it on a terrible yacht.
I had no desire for a yacht.
But the authority mattered.
My daughters knew the trust had existed once.
They believed it had been depleted.
I had never told them that.
I had simply stopped correcting them.
That distinction would matter ethically more than legally.
The personal checking account they watched had indeed fallen below ninety dollars.
Because I had moved operating cash.
Not because I had spent the fortune.
The house had indeed been sold.
Because I wanted a smaller condominium.
Not because creditors took it.
The old family office had closed.
Because I fired it.
Not because we were insolvent.
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My daughters had been reading fragments and filling in the rest.
Eventually, they began behaving as though the story they created had become fact.
