At eight, she sent a message accusing him of attempting to extort the company.
He forwarded it to counsel.
At nine, Wesley entered the top floor of Mercer Works wearing the only clean button-down shirt he owned.
Renata sat at the head of the boardroom table beneath a framed photograph of Gil breaking ground on the company’s first tower.
Della had been cropped out of the photograph.
Trevor took the chair beside Wesley.
Renata tried to have them removed.
Outside counsel stopped her.
The trust documents had been compared with state records, old tax filings, archived licensing payments, and the company’s original incorporation minutes.
The signatures were authentic.
The trust had never been dissolved.
Its ownership of the Mercer design library and commercial mark had been acknowledged by the operating company every year for more than three decades.
Gil had signed those acknowledgments quietly.
Renata had signed two of them as a company officer.
When counsel placed copies on the table, she stopped claiming the trust was imaginary.
Instead, she attacked Wesley.
“He abandoned this family nineteen years ago,” she said.
“He knows nothing about the company.
He intends to shut it down because he resents his father.”
Wesley looked at the directors, then at the financial officers standing along the wall.
They were the same kind of witnesses who had remained silent when Renata laughed at the workshop.
“My father let me leave,” he said.
“That is true.
He failed me in ways these documents do not repair.
But the company has active projects and people who depend on their paychecks.
I will authorize a thirty-day temporary license while the trust is reviewed.
No fee.
No interruption.”
The room changed.
Renata had prepared them for a bitter son demanding money.
Wesley gave them stability.
Then he placed her fifteen-thousand-dollar purchase offer beside the one-dollar renewal form.
“But I will not sign this,” he said.
“And I will not transfer the workshop.”
Outside counsel asked Renata whether she had disclosed the expiring license to the board, the lenders, or the company’s auditors.
She said Gil had handled it.
Counsel asked whether she had ordered employees to search old archives for trust records after Gil entered the hospital.
She said she did not remember.
Trevor opened an email on his phone.
Gil had copied him on a message from Renata instructing a company administrator to remove references to Della Mercer and the licensing trust from an internal history project.
Another attachment showed Renata requesting a valuation of the cost to replace the Mercer systems eighteen months earlier.
Renata turned on Trevor.
“After everything I gave you?”
Trevor’s voice shook, but he did not lower the phone.
“You gave me a seat close enough to watch you erase people.”
The board called a recess.
When the directors returned, Renata was temporarily removed from her executive role pending an independent investigation.
She still owned the controlling stake Gil had left her, but debt agreements, minority shareholder protections, and the board’s governance rules prevented her from operating the company while accused of concealing a material licensing risk.
For the first time since the funeral, she had no order anyone was required to obey.
She gathered her papers and stopped behind Wesley’s chair.
“You think that workshop makes you your father?”
Wesley looked up at her.
“No.
It reminds me who my mother was.”
The negotiations lasted six weeks.
Wesley refused every proposal that treated the trust as a lottery ticket.
