Chapter 8
Travis wanted Lorraine removed from everything immediately.
Rebecca stopped him.
“You don’t control everything.”
“I’m her son.”
“That sentence is the problem.”
He stared.
Rebecca continued.
“Hudson National controls the trust. Your father controls parts of the family office. Courts control criminal matters. You control your house and your own participation.”
Mara understood before Travis did.
“What can we give up?”
Rebecca looked at her.
“Potentially a lot.”
Travis and Mara received benefits from the Carter Family Office.
Travel reimbursements for certain family events.
Use of a vacation property.
Education support for descendants.
Administrative assistance.
Preferential access to family investment opportunities.
None necessary for survival.
All convenient.
A full audit could find their own errors.
A broader investigation could delay distributions.
Create tax amendments.
Trigger civil claims.
Embarrass Howard.
Expose relatives who had accepted shifted money without knowing.
Rebecca gave them two paths.
Narrow:
Correct Zia’s account.
Recover her money.
Remove Lorraine from matters involving Zia.
Keep the rest inside the family.
Broad:
Authorize a five-year independent audit of descendant allocations, family-office reimbursements, copied signatures, vendor payments, and access records.
Allow Hudson National and outside counsel to report legally required misconduct.
No Travis veto.
No Mara veto.
No Howard veto.
Travis looked at Mara.
She asked:
“What does broad do to Zia?”
“Temporarily freezes some discretionary distributions while accounts are reconstructed.”
“She’ll be fine.”
“Yes.”
“What does it do to the cousins?”
“Possibly nothing personally. Adults may need to reimburse misallocated benefits. We would not recommend clawing Christmas presents out of children’s hands.”
Good.
Mara said:
“Broad.”
Travis nodded.
Rebecca held up a hand.
“There’s another part.”
Because Travis had signed prior annual family-office summaries without reading supporting allocations, he could be considered part of the oversight failure even if he knew nothing about Lorraine’s scheme.
A truly independent review would examine him too.
Travis looked at the forms.
“How bad?”
“No idea.”
“Do it.”
Mara looked at him.
He continued.
“I spent years telling myself Mom handled the details because she was better at them.”
He paused.
“Apparently ‘details’ included my daughter.”
They signed.
Travis also resigned from the Carter Family Education Committee, where he had technically held a seat but rarely attended.
Howard asked him not to.
Travis refused.
“If I want professionals to examine Mom’s conflict, I don’t get to pretend my absentee oversight deserves a chair.”
That decision could not be easily undone.
The audit began.
Three days later, it found Travis’s first mistake.
A family-office trip to Colorado had been reimbursed as a descendant educational trip because Zia visited a science museum while the family was there.
The primary reason for travel had been Travis attending a business conference.
Improper amount:
$8,600.
He repaid it with interest.
Another:
$3,200 of home security costs had been billed to a family child-safety account when the upgrades primarily protected Travis’s office.
Repaid.
Lorraine’s lawyer immediately cited the errors.
Travis shrugged.
“She’s right.”
Mara looked at him.
“About what?”
“I signed things I shouldn’t have signed without checking.”
He transferred the money.
May you like
“That doesn’t make what she did disappear.”
No one got to use another person’s mistake as detergent.
