“I am protecting what you treated as yours.”
She pointed at me.
“You have always hated your brother.”
Simon seized the opening.
“Exactly.
This is revenge.
She fabricated the audit because she could never stand that Grandpa trusted me with the business.”
I removed the final set of exhibits.
They included emails between Simon and a bookkeeping employee named Carla Ruiz.
In one message, Simon instructed her to classify a personal transfer as a property-maintenance expense.
In another, he told her to delete draft ledgers after printing them.
Carla was sitting in the back row.
Simon saw her only after the clerk called her name.
His face changed completely.
Carla walked to the witness stand with her shoulders tight and her hands clasped.
She had worked for Simon’s company for six years.
Three months before Grandpa died, she resigned after Simon ordered her to alter records connected to the trust.
Under oath, she described how he used company invoices to disguise personal spending.
She identified payments for his car lease, club membership, vacations, and tailored clothing.
“Did Mrs.
Jameson know?” my attorney asked.
Carla looked toward my mother.
“She brought me a list of transfers and told me which descriptions to use.”
My mother laughed once, sharply.
“She is lying because Simon fired her.”
“I resigned,” Carla said.
“And I kept the emails because I was afraid you would blame me.”
The judge reviewed the authentication records accompanying the messages.
Simon’s attorney—still technically counsel until the withdrawal request was decided—leaned toward him and whispered something urgent.
Simon’s reply was loud enough for the nearest rows to hear.
“I am not settling with her.”
There it was.
Even then, he believed the real problem was that I would not surrender.
Judge Fairbanks allowed the attorney to withdraw after ensuring my mother and Simon understood the consequences.
He gave them the option of requesting a continuance to obtain new counsel.
Simon refused.
“We came here for a ruling,” he said.
“Give us one.”
My mother nodded beside him.
Their arrogance had brought them into court.
Now it trapped them there.
The judge warned them that proceeding without counsel was unwise.
They insisted.
He reviewed the petition, the trust amendment, the audit, the bank affidavit, the recording, and Carla’s testimony.
He also examined the medical report my mother had used to call me unstable.
It was not a psychiatric evaluation.
It was a two-year-old urgent-care note documenting a panic attack after Grandpa’s first hospitalization.
My mother had attached it to the petition and described it as proof of chronic incapacity.
The judge looked at her over his glasses.
“Did the physician who wrote this note ever conclude that your daughter was incapable of managing financial affairs?”
“She was crying and shaking,” my mother replied.
“That was not my question.”
“No.”
“Did you request Rebecca’s permission to release this medical record?”
She said nothing.
The judge’s expression hardened.
His ruling took nearly twenty minutes.
He denied the petition to remove me as trustee.
He recognized the amended trust as presumptively valid, subject to any properly filed challenge supported by evidence rather than accusation.
He ordered a full accounting of every questioned transaction and continued the freeze on distributions to my mother and Simon.
He authorized me, as successor trustee, to secure trust property, preserve
