My Multi-millionaire Daughter Invited Me To Her Mother’s Will Reading Just To Mock Me With $50. She Thought I Was A Disgraceful Fraud Who Ruined Our Family. Then The Lawyer Opened The Final Letter, And Her Face Turned White. Who Really Lost Everything?
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
Brandon put a warning hand on her arm.
“It’s nothing, Vic. Just an old woman’s weird sense of humor.”
But Victoria was visibly agitated now. This wasn’t going according to her script.
She was supposed to be the star, and the opening acts were getting too much attention. She began tapping her perfectly manicured nails on the table.
Tap, tap, tap. The sound echoed in the quiet room.
Whitmore ignored her and continued.
“Fifth, I give and bequeath my collection of first-edition medical texts to the UCSF library, with the exception of one volume: a 1953 copy of Watson and Crick’s original paper on DNA structure, which I leave to—”
Victoria slammed her hand flat on the table. The sound was like a gunshot.
“Whitmore, for God’s sake!”
She boomed.
“Can we skip the charity donations and the staff tips? My time is valuable. I have a board meeting at two. Just get to the actual estate. The company. The patents. The real assets. Get to the part where it all comes to me.”
The room fell into suffocating silence. Mr. Whitmore stopped reading.
He didn’t look startled or angry. He simply stopped.
Very slowly, he raised his head, his eyes still behind the reading glasses. Then, with a deliberation that was more threatening than any shout, he removed the glasses.
He folded them. He placed them on the table, and he stared at my daughter.
His gaze was flat, cold, and utterly unimpressed. It was the look of a man who’d dealt with entitled children his entire career and was, in this final moment, done with it.
“Miss Chen,”
Whitmore said.
His voice dropped into a lower register, losing its monotone and becoming precise and sharp.
“This is not a negotiation. It is not a business meeting. It is the legal proclamation of a deceased woman’s final wishes. I will read every single word in this document exactly as your mother wrote it, and you will sit there and you will listen. Is that clear?”
Victoria’s face flushed a dark, ugly red. She’d been challenged, dressed down like a child in front of her fiancé and her friend.
She opened her mouth, then closed it. She looked at Brandon, who quickly shook his head.
She was trapped. Whitmore held her gaze for one beat longer, then, satisfied, he put his glasses back on.
He picked up the document, deliberately flattened the page, and took a small, composed sip of water from the glass beside him. He’d made her wait.
He’d reestablished control.
“Very well,”
He said, his voice returning to its neutral monotone.
“Let us continue.”
The Exposure of the Entourage
He cleared his throat.
“Sixth, regarding the personal associates of my daughter, Victoria Chen.”
I saw Brandon sit up straighter. His shark-like smile returned, fixed in place.
He smoothed the lapel of his suit, adjusting his posture, ready to receive his expected bonus for managing Victoria’s anticipated fortune. Jessica put down her phone, her eyes bright with greedy anticipation.
Whitmore continued.
“To my daughter’s social media manager, Jessica Park.”
He pronounced the title with just the slightest emphasis, as if placing it in quotation marks.
“I give and bequeath the sum of $10,000.”
Jessica’s smile froze. $10,000.
It wasn’t nothing, but it wasn’t what she’d expected. Not from a $200 million estate.
But Whitmore wasn’t finished.
“I bequeath this sum,”
He read.
“With the sincere hope that she will use it to purchase authentic designer items rather than continuing to borrow them for Instagram posts and conveniently forgetting to return them. My accountant has documented four Chanel bags, two Hermes scarves, and one Bulgari bracelet that have mysteriously disappeared from my collection over the past two years.”
Jessica’s perfect face turned a blotchy, mortified red. Her mouth fell open.
She hadn’t just been insulted; she’d been exposed as a thief in front of the lawyer, in front of Brandon, in front of me. Most importantly, she was exposed in front of Victoria, the source of all her social access and borrowed luxury.
“The crazy old—”
Jessica started, her voice shrill.
“Shut up!”
Victoria hissed, her voice sharp. She wasn’t defending Jessica; she was silencing a problem.
Her perfect image was being dismantled piece by piece. Whitmore turned to Brandon and to my daughter’s fiancé, Brandon Hartwell.
Brandon’s smile was still in place, but I could see his knuckles whitening as he gripped the armrests of his chair.
“I give and bequeath the sum of $25,000, with the attached legally binding recommendation that he use it to repay the $173,000 he has embezzled from his father’s nonprofit foundation, the Hartwell Youth Initiative. My forensic accountant has already submitted a complete report to the FBI. This bequest should help with legal fees.”
The smile vanished. Brandon’s tan face went waxy pale.
His head snapped toward Victoria, his eyes wide with betrayal and panic.
“What is this?”
He hissed, his voice a low vibration of rage.
“Victoria, what the hell is this?”
“I don’t know,”
Victoria said, but her voice was uncertain for the first time. Her armor was cracking.
“It doesn’t matter,”
Victoria suddenly snarled, though her voice lacked its earlier confidence.
“None of this matters. These are nothing. Scraps. Jokes.”
She turned her furious gaze on Whitmore.
“Get on with it! Stop wasting time with this trash and read my part!”
I sat there perfectly still, watching it unfold. For the first time in twenty years, I felt a strange connection to Diane.
This was the woman I’d married—not the victim Victoria had painted her to be, but a brilliant, calculating, lethally precise woman. She wasn’t just reading a will; she was settling scores.
She was burning down Victoria’s world piece by piece, leaving her isolated before the final blow. Mr. Whitmore waited for the shouting to subside.
He looked at Victoria, his expression unreadable.
“As I have already stated, Miss Chen, I will read every word.”
