Chapter 3 - THE COMPANY GARRETT CALLED HIS
The board of Lattice Harbor held an emergency meeting the next morning.
I did not demand that North Pine withdraw every dollar. Doing so would have punished employees who knew nothing about Garrett’s conduct.
Instead, the board froze new executive spending, preserved payroll funds and placed Garrett and Vivian on administrative leave pending an independent audit.
Garrett called the decision a family attack disguised as corporate governance.
Nadia disagreed.
“This became a board matter when a forged guarantee entered the financing process.”
My family-law attorney, Celia Brooks, filed for legal separation and requested temporary custody orders. She warned me not to assume Garrett’s public behavior would automatically prevent him from seeing Oliver.
“The court will examine the child’s safety, his conduct and whether supervision is necessary,” she said. “It won’t decide custody based on who controls the money.”
That was how it should be.
Donna gave a formal statement about the assault. She admitted that Garrett had not threatened her before the christening, but Vivian had spent months mocking her accent, clothing and home in Sebastopol.
Garrett usually responded with silence or a private apology afterward.
I had accepted those apologies because confronting him felt like admitting I had married a man who enjoyed status more than kindness.
The audit found three immediate problems.
Lattice Harbor had paid $740,000 in “brand-positioning fees” to VLM Advisory, a company owned by Vivian. There were no clear deliverables beyond event planning, wardrobe consulting and introductions to donors.
The christening reception had been billed partly to Lattice Harbor as an investor-relations event.
Garrett’s tuxedo, Vivian’s gown and the ballroom flowers appeared in company expense records.
More disturbing was a draft transaction called Project Meridian. It proposed transferring Lattice Harbor’s most valuable software patents into a new entity before North Pine’s next funding round.
Garrett and Vivian would control that entity.
The existing company—the one North Pine had funded—would pay licensing fees to use technology its employees had created.
If the transaction proceeded, North Pine and the smaller investors would own shares in a weakened company while Garrett controlled the valuable assets elsewhere.
The forged guarantee would keep cash flowing long enough to complete the transfer.
Nadia found the first Project Meridian draft attached to an email sent eighteen months earlier.
Garrett had written:
Once the family-office connection is confirmed, we restructure before Evelyn can use it against us.
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He had known North Pine belonged to my family long before the christening.
He simply had not known that I controlled it.
