“She transferred your Del Mar property into an LLC,” I said. “There are retirement withdrawals you didn’t authorize. A credit line in your name. Adrien has a forensic document examiner looking at a deed signature.”
He looked at me sharply.
For one moment I saw the old version of my father—the real estate man, the negotiator, the one who could read a term sheet upside down and find the poison in the footnotes. It flashed back into his face like electricity.
“What?”
I opened the drawer, took out copies, and handed them to him.
He read for a long time.
I watched him do it because sometimes witnessing a person discover the truth matters more than adding commentary to it. He went pale halfway through the first page, then flushed darkly at the second. By the time he got to the preliminary handwriting opinion, his hands were shaking.
“She told me this was estate simplification,” he said. “She said the Del Mar transfer protected us from probate delay. The line of credit—I remember a packet during rehab. I was on medication. She said it was for account consolidation.”
“It was for access,” I said.
He stared at the paper.