Chapter 5 - MY FATHER’S NAME
My father’s name was Thomas Brooks.
Civil engineer.
Quiet.
Practical.
Dead from pancreatic cancer at fifty-nine.
He had never met Grant.
At least, that was what I believed.
Mercer Advisory’s archived formation document listed:
Thomas E. Brooks.
Not my father’s exact legal name.
Thomas Edward Brooks.
Could be coincidence.
Then Maya found the tax ID linkage.
Same social security suffix.
Same birth date.
My father.
“How?”
“Identity misuse after death,” Maya said.
Someone had used his information to create the shell.
Why him?
Because dead people do not ask questions.
Then a second shock.
My father had once worked on a Hale Capital construction project.
Eighteen years earlier.
A logistics center outside Dallas.
He was the project engineer.
I remembered vaguely.
A job he hated.
Long days.
Arguments.
Then he quit.
At the time he told me:
“Some people think money makes concrete obey.”
I thought it was a joke.
Now I wondered.
Maya obtained old court archives.
There had been a dispute.
Safety defects.
Cost overruns.
My father raised concerns.
Hale Capital threatened litigation.
Then settled privately.
Records sealed.
Richard Hale’s signature.
Thomas Brooks’s signature.
Grant would have been seventeen.
Maybe no connection to him then.
But the family knew my father.
Which meant when Grant met me fourteen years later, my last name should have meant something.
Did it?
I asked him through counsel.
His response:
No knowledge prior to relationship.
Maybe true.
Then Celeste Hale’s archived email contradicted him.
To Grant, three weeks after our first date:
Brooks? Ask which Brooks. If she is Thomas’s daughter, be careful.
My stomach turned.
Grant replied:
She is.
Celeste:
Interesting.
No follow-up.
At least not in the email chain Daniel had.
Why interesting?
Maya requested the sealed settlement.
Court approval took time.
Meanwhile, Mercer Advisory received four million from Hale Capital.
Then distributed funds to:
A political consultant.
A private investigator.
A trust in the Cayman Islands.
And one payment:
$650,000 to BRK Holdings.
BRK.
Brooks?
My company?
No.
BRK belonged to someone named Evan Mercer.
Who was Evan Mercer?
Maya stared at the incorporation record.
Then at me.
“Emma, Mercer was your mother’s maiden name.”
May you like
My mother, Susan Mercer Brooks, was alive.
And suddenly my dead father was not the only family member connected to Grant’s hidden money.
