Chapter 10 - The Casting Call
Allison Reed met investigators in a small office with a lawyer of her own.
She arrived carrying a folder filled with emails, payment records, and the original advertisement that had brought her to the farmhouse.
She had been promised a substantial fee for appearing in a mock legal-document training video.
She said Owen Briggs ran the filming and told her the farmhouse belonged to the company commissioning the work.
He had shown her clips of me walking with a cane and instructed her to copy the pace.
Those clips were personal recovery videos I had once sent to my mother.
I looked at Mom across the interview-room glass.
She stared at the floor.
“I never gave anyone those,” she said.
I believed she might be telling the truth, because we already knew Dad had controlled the messages.
But it still hurt to see my private suffering turned into a set of acting notes.
Allison said she had never met the notary named in the document and had not knowingly signed a property deed.
The signatures she practiced were on blank training pages.
She produced photos of the pages from her phone.
Price compared them with the forged deed and found a plausible path from the practice sheets to the document.
Outside, Allison stopped me.
“I didn't know it was your life,” she said.
I thought about the rage I wanted to unload on anyone who had touched the scheme.
Instead, I answered, “Now you do. Tell the investigators everything.”
That afternoon, Conrad Vale's attorney contacted Price and indicated his client would cooperate under formal terms.
Vale claimed he was hired to design a real estate structure, not forge my signature.
He also disclosed that Dad had instructed him to prepare alternate closing scenarios if the trust transfer failed.
One scenario involved a court order declaring me legally incapable of managing property.
For a moment, I could not speak.
My father had spent years calling me unstable in public.
Now I saw why the story mattered to him financially.
Vale's files included a draft petition citing my injuries, military trauma, and long deployments as supposed evidence of incapacity.
It contained allegations no qualified clinician had evaluated.
It was unsigned and had not been filed.
Still, the intent made my skin crawl.
At the end of the day, Mara asked me to sit down.
“There is another issue,” she said.
“The estate documents say your grandfather put something aside for a second beneficiary.”
I felt my pulse quicken.
“Who?”
She looked at the name on the final page.
May you like
“Lewis Mercer.”
