The Signature My Son In Law Wanted
What Meredith Found
Meredith spent the next two days doing what good attorneys and good bookkeepers both do when something does not add up: she followed the paper.
She found, first, that Rob’s insurance agency had quietly let him go from a senior producer role eight months earlier, a fact he had never mentioned at a single family dinner since, including the two Thanksgivings and one Easter where he had talked at length about “closing a big commercial account” that, as far as anyone could tell, no longer existed. He had kept driving the same truck, kept the same gym membership, kept ordering the same bottle of wine that cost more than I used to pay a driver for a week hauling freight, on income that had, in fact, stopped eight months prior.
She found, second, that Rob had opened a small business line of credit eleven months earlier under an LLC with a name generic enough that nobody would think twice about it, something like a consulting shell, and had drawn it down close to its limit financing what looked like a string of bad short term trades in commodities and cryptocurrency, the kind of trading a man does when he is trying to make one big score fix a hole that is getting bigger by the month rather than smaller.
She found, third, and this was the piece that turned my stomach the most, that eleven weeks before my closing, Rob had asked a loan officer at our own community bank, a man I have known for twenty years, about the process for a family member co-signing or gaining financial power of attorney over “a relative expecting a significant liquidity event.” The loan officer had not thought much of the question at the time. Families ask about estate planning all the time. But he remembered the phrase “significant liquidity event” specifically, because it had struck him as an oddly corporate way for a son-in-law to describe his father-in-law’s retirement.
Rob had known the sale was coming for months. He had known the number, roughly, because Becky would have mentioned it, the way daughters mention things to husbands they trust. And rather than tell his wife the truth about his job, his debts, or the hole he had dug for himself trading money he did not have, he had built a plan to solve all three problems in a single signature at a steakhouse, banking on a tired sixty year old man not reading page three of three too closely on a night meant for celebration.