Three days after my twin sons were born, my husband brought twenty-two members of his family into a hospital room and offered me two hundred thousand dollars to sign away my marriage, my children, and my right to ever ask about their company's accounts. They expected me to cry. I read every page and signed all of them.

I said all of it. Eleven minutes.

And she said, "In front of them?"

I said in front of all of them.

There was a pause on that line and then Beatrix Nwankwo said, "Then go to sleep. I'll be at the board office when it opens."

They thought a signature meant surrender. They had twenty-two witnesses to the moment they won.

That is exactly what they had.

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PART 2 — THE QUESTION IN THE MEETING

I am Rhea Oberlin and I was the controller at Thackery Row Holdings for five years.

Not the bookkeeper. The controller. I ran the ledger, the reconciliations, the reporting, and the client accounts, and I was good at it and Adelaide Thackery hired me herself in 2019 because I was good at it.

Thackery Row is a residential property management company. Four hundred and eleven units across Hadley Vale.

If you manage rentals, you hold other people's money. Security deposits, prepaid rent, reserves. In this state that money goes into a client trust account and it is not the company's money and it never becomes the company's money, and there are rules about it that are not complicated and not optional.