Melissa’s interview was scheduled for the following afternoon at her attorney’s office. Nathan would attend on my behalf, while the estate firm’s counsel would handle questions about the disputed documents. Prescott Global’s independent investigators had arranged a separate interview concerning the consulting payments. The two proceedings would remain distinct, although information could be shared through the appropriate legal channels.
I spent the morning trying not to imagine what Melissa might say. She had worked for my grandfather, appeared beside Aaron during his final days, and later become a trusted employee at Prescott Global. I had once considered her a friend. She had joined us for dinner, sent me birthday messages, and asked about my grandfather’s health when he was ill.
If she had helped alter the estate documents, I wanted to understand why. If she had not, I wanted to know who had used her position to make it appear otherwise.
Nathan called before leaving for the interview. He reminded me that Melissa’s willingness to speak did not make her account automatically reliable. She might be telling the truth, minimizing her own involvement, or attempting to shift responsibility to someone else. We would compare every statement against the records.
The interview began with the administrative account. Melissa acknowledged that she had retained access to an email address originally assigned to her during her employment with my grandfather. She said Arthur had asked her to keep the account active while he transferred certain files to his private office. Later, when she joined Prescott Global, the account had been used for scheduling and document delivery.
She admitted that the arrangement had never been properly documented.
When asked why, she said the company had been growing quickly and that Aaron wanted her to manage confidential matters without creating additional administrative delays. She insisted she had not used the account to conceal financial transactions, but she agreed that its continued use had created an obvious weakness in the recordkeeping process.
The investigators then asked about Cole Strategic Advisory. Melissa acknowledged helping establish the vendor relationship and preparing some of the invoices. She claimed the consulting work had been requested by a senior executive and that she had relied on assurances that the payments were approved.
She refused to say who had given the original instruction.
Her attorney intervened when investigators asked whether she personally benefited from the payments. Melissa said she had not received money directly from the vendor, but she acknowledged that a relative was connected to one of the companies receiving funds. She denied knowing the full ownership structure.
The answers were incomplete, but they were more specific than her earlier denials. Investigators requested the vendor correspondence, the original consulting agreements, and any personal records relevant to the transactions. Melissa agreed to cooperate within the limits of her legal obligations.
The estate interview began after a short break. Nathan asked Melissa to describe her role in preparing my grandfather’s amendment.
She said Arthur had asked her to organize the paperwork and obtain the necessary signatures. She remembered that my grandfather’s instructions were still being reviewed during the final days of his life. She also remembered being told that the amendment needed to be filed promptly to avoid delays in administering the estate.
“Who told you that?” Nathan asked.
Melissa looked at her attorney before answering. “Arthur.”
“Did your grandfather personally authorize the final version?”
“I believed he had.”
“Did you see him sign it?”
“No.”
“Did you witness his signature?”
“No.”
Nathan placed the registry image on the table. The final page bore Melissa’s name beneath the declaration that the required authorization had been obtained.
“Why did you sign this?”
Melissa’s composure weakened. She said she had signed as the person submitting the document, not as a witness to my grandfather’s signature. She claimed she had believed the declaration was a standard administrative certification and that Arthur had assured her the supporting letter existed.
Nathan asked whether she had read the declaration before signing it.
She admitted that she had not read every line.
I felt a bitter recognition. Aaron had signed without reading. I had signed without reading. Melissa now claimed she had done the same. Three people had treated an important document as a formality, and my grandfather’s instructions had become trapped inside a process no one seemed willing to examine.
But the resemblance did not make the decisions equivalent. Melissa had signed a declaration that represented a fact about my grandfather’s authorization. Whether she understood the legal effect of that declaration, she had been responsible for the accuracy of what she certified.
Nathan asked about the missing letter. Melissa said Arthur had shown her a page that he described as confirmation of my grandfather’s consent. She remembered seeing the first paragraph and a signature near the bottom, but she could not say whether the signature was genuine. She had not retained a copy.
“Where is the original now?” Nathan asked.
“I don't know.”
“Did you remove it from the office?”
“No.”
“Did Aaron?”
She paused.
“I never saw Aaron take a letter.”
Nathan asked whether she had ever told Aaron that the letter existed. Melissa said she had mentioned that Arthur claimed to have received a final instruction from my grandfather. She did not remember discussing the letter in detail.
That account left a gap. Aaron had denied knowing about the final instruction, yet his calendar note showed that Arthur had told him the instruction was pending. Melissa now claimed she had spoken to him about a later confirmation. Someone was remembering incorrectly, or someone was withholding part of the story.
The interview continued for nearly two hours. Melissa described the day she left my grandfather’s office and said she had been instructed to deliver a packet to Arthur’s private office. She denied opening it. She also denied removing any original documents from the archive.
Nathan asked why the registry receipt had been sent to the old administrative account.
“Because that was the account Arthur used for estate correspondence,” she replied. “It was already on the filing paperwork.”
“Who had access to it when the receipt arrived?”
“Arthur, me, and possibly someone at Prescott Global who had been given the login.”
“Who?”
Melissa said she could not remember.
Her attorney ended the interview shortly afterward. Before leaving, Melissa asked whether the missing letter had been found. Nathan told her that we had recovered an incomplete document, but not the complete signed letter she described.
She looked genuinely unsettled.
“If the missing page is still out there,” she said, “you need to find it before you decide what happened.”
“Why?” Nathan asked.
Melissa hesitated.
“Because the first page didn't tell the whole story.”
Her attorney immediately asked to end the interview. Melissa left without explaining what the second page contained.
Nathan called me from the car. He was careful not to characterize her statement as proof of wrongdoing, but he believed her final comment was important. She had described a letter with more than one page, and the incomplete document we had found ended in the middle of a sentence. The two accounts were consistent.
The question was whether the missing page had been removed accidentally, stored elsewhere, or deliberately withheld.
The next morning, the estate firm located a shipping receipt from the week Arthur retired. A sealed packet had been sent to a private storage address under his name. The receipt did not list the contents, but its reference number matched the number written on the back of Aaron’s acknowledgment.
Nathan requested the storage records through the appropriate legal process. Arthur’s former office manager confirmed that the address belonged to a commercial document facility, not to Arthur’s home. The facility had since changed ownership, and its older records were stored off-site.
It would take time to determine whether the packet still existed.
Meanwhile, Prescott Global’s investigators found that Cole Strategic Advisory had submitted invoices for services described as “executive liaison,” “strategic coordination,” and “confidential transition support.” Several invoices were accompanied by meeting schedules, but no reports or substantive work product could be located.
The committee asked Michael to identify the executives who had requested the services. He could confirm that some meetings had occurred, but the records did not establish that the vendor had performed the work described. The committee therefore suspended payment on outstanding invoices while the review continued.
Aaron provided a statement acknowledging that he had failed to demand adequate documentation for certain expenses associated with Jasmine. He maintained that he had not knowingly approved fraudulent payments and requested that the investigators distinguish between personal misconduct and financial misconduct.
The distinction was reasonable, but it did not erase his responsibility. His relationship with Jasmine had created a conflict of interest, and he had allowed company resources to support expenses that should have been disclosed and reviewed independently.
For the first time, Aaron’s public position and his private behavior were being examined by the same process. He could no longer separate the executive who demanded accountability from the husband who had repeatedly avoided it.
That evening, he sent me a message asking whether we could talk about the future. I replied that our attorneys were handling the divorce and that I would not discuss reconciliation while the estate questions remained unresolved.
He answered almost immediately.
“You're treating me as if everything I did was part of some plan.”
I read the message and considered how to respond. I did not know whether Aaron had participated in a deliberate scheme involving my inheritance. The evidence was incomplete, and I was not prepared to accuse him of something we had not established.
But I knew what he had done to our marriage. He had lied about his absences, carried on a relationship with Jasmine, and withheld information when I asked direct questions. Those facts did not depend on the outcome of the estate investigation.
I wrote back that I was not deciding what happened to the documents before the evidence was examined. I was deciding what I could accept in a marriage.
He did not reply.
Two days later, the document storage facility confirmed that a packet associated with Arthur Bellamy had been transferred to a different warehouse during a company restructuring. The packet’s reference number appeared in the transfer inventory, but the contents had not been itemized.
Nathan requested access to the surviving records and asked the facility to preserve the packet if it could be located.
When he called to update me, he sounded cautiously hopeful. “We finally have a traceable location,” he said. “That doesn't mean the letter is there, but it gives us a concrete lead.”
For the first time in weeks, I felt that the investigation might reach a conclusion rather than generating an endless chain of new questions.
Then Nathan added one more detail.
The transfer inventory listed two packets under the same reference number. One had been sent to storage. The other had been marked as collected by an authorized representative.
The collection date was six years earlier, shortly after my grandfather’s death.
The representative’s name was missing.
Click here to continue reading: PART 11: The Storage Record Led Us to a Locked Archive, Where One Missing Page Changed the Meaning of Everything
At 3:17 in the Morning, I Finally Stopped Protecting the Man Who Had Forgotten He Was Married
Part 10 of 20
