The Bitter Inheritance

Vera Okafor decides which family firms live. She has never asked for permission and never needed any. Then the founder of Hartwell & Sons dies and leaves her as executor — alongside a grandson no one knew existed. Cal Hartwell wants the company sold, the money gone, and the families his grandfather poisoned paid back. One of them buys out the other in ninety days. The audit decides the price. But forty years of books hold something worse than fraud, and the board wants it buried before the deadline. Vera and Cal can spend ninety days destroying each other, or ninety days proving what the old man did. They pick both.