The room stayed silent while Gideon explained what happened next. The restraining order did not remove Dad or Marguerite from the company permanently, but it froze the transactions under dispute until an independent accounting review could be completed. A special board meeting was already scheduled for Monday morning. Dad finally understood that this was no birthday confrontation. Six months of evidence had simply reached the point where pretending nothing was wrong was no longer possible.
Marguerite turned on Dad almost immediately. She insisted he had told her every transfer was legitimate and that the holding company arrangements had been approved years earlier. Dad told her to stop talking. That reaction said more than anything else. Gideon quietly collected the documents while my relatives stared at two people they had spent years praising as the responsible ones in the family.
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