Her voice was almost pleasant. Did you know then? No. You expect me to accept that? I expect you to check it. She did.
That is the thing about Evelyn Blackwood that people underestimated for years. She was capable of enormous anger and she was still capable in the middle of it of gathering evidence. She had Malcolm Reeves in her office for 2 hours that afternoon with her own council present. And she made him produce his engagement letter, his intake record, his correspondence log, and his billing entries. The record was unambiguous.
Malcolm had received my first message on the 12th of May, 4 months after the marriage contract was executed. He had opened a file the next morning. He had spent 8 days pulling county records in three states and 2 days verifying that no other line of disscent survived. He had reached certainty 48 hours before the board meeting and had called me that evening. And I had told him I needed a day to tell my wife before anything else happened and he had agreed to wait then why didn't you tell me she said you had two days I had one evening you didn't come home then Harrison moved the vote up 11 days and I found out about it the same morning you did she sat down slowly I could see her recalculating and I could see how much it cost her because if I was telling the truth then she had built her entire case against me out of the only material she had ever trusted, which was the assumption that everyone is running an angle.
When I married you, I said I didn't know Silus Hail had ever owned a bolt in this company. I thought he was a man in a photograph who looked like my mother. I signed your contract because my payroll was 3 weeks out. That's the whole conspiracy. And then Malcolm Reeves, who had been sitting quietly in the corner with his hands on his case, cleared his throat and said that before anyone concluded anything, there was a document the two of us needed to see, and that he had debated all afternoon whether to produce it in front of company council.
He had gone back through the trust's administrative file, 45 years of maintenance filings, custodian changes, and periodic certifications, the kind of paperwork that exists solely so a trust does not lapse. Somebody at Blackwood Meridian had been maintaining the Hail Trust the entire time. Not ignoring it, maintaining it. Someone had been signing an annual certification confirming the instrument's continued existence and the ongoing search for the hail line. The signature on the certifications every year since 2004 was Harrison Blackwoods.
Evelyn did not move. He knew Malcolm said he has known for at least N22 years and based on the file structure I believe his father told him considerably earlier. Then Malcolm turned to the last page of the trust instrument and read the provision that nobody in that family had bothered to read in two generations. The one that came after the waking condition. If the trust's restrictions terminated and no lawful hail air could be identified and verified within 180 days, the 27% founders's interest did not go to the buyer and it did not go to the company.