Chapter 11 - Lauren Finally Admitted Why She Framed Me
The civil deposition happened three months later.
Lauren’s attorneys advised her carefully.
Mine did too.
Most of her answers were controlled.
Then my attorney asked about the emails that caused Dad to throw me off the ranch.
Lauren initially claimed she merely forwarded what she received.
The metadata showed she had cropped the chain.
She changed her answer.
She said she removed “irrelevant portions.”
“What was irrelevant?” my attorney asked.
The missing paragraphs were the ones showing that I had raised concerns about ranch collateral.
Lauren had made it appear I contacted the lender to sabotage her.
In reality, I had asked whether Dad had approved using ranch property.
“Why remove those paragraphs?”
Lauren stayed silent for a long time.
Then answered.
“Because Grace would have stopped the loan.”
Not:
Because Grace was wrong.
Not:
Because she was unstable.
Because I would have stopped it.
I sat across the room and felt eighteen months of anger become strangely quiet.
Lauren had not removed me because I was weak.
She removed me because I was inconvenient.
My attorney asked:
“Did you believe your father had approved the loan?”
Lauren replied:
“I believed he would once he understood the opportunity.”
That sentence was devastating.
She had begun treating anticipated consent as actual consent.
She believed being right about the future gave her permission to bypass people in the present.
Dad.
Me.
The board.
Everyone.
That same belief later drove her response to the deed.
May you like
Dad’s no did not feel legitimate because Lauren believed her own plan was better.
I finally understood why he wrote that she had stopped hearing no.
