At four in the morning I sent Beatrix Nwankwo a message that said: They did it. Twenty-two of them. There was a camera.
She rang me at four-eleven. She did not ask how I was either, which I appreciated more than anything anybody said to me that week.
She said, "Rhea. Did you read it before you signed?"
I said all of it. Eleven minutes.
And she said, "In front of them?"
I said in front of all of them.
There was a pause on that line and then Beatrix Nwankwo said, "Then go to sleep. I'll be at the board office when it opens."
They thought a signature meant surrender. They had twenty-two witnesses to the moment they won.
That is exactly what they had.
PART 2 — THE QUESTION IN THE MEETING
I am Rhea Oberlin and I was the controller at Thackery Row Holdings for five years.
Not the bookkeeper. The controller. I ran the ledger, the reconciliations, the reporting, and the client accounts, and I was good at it and Adelaide Thackery hired me herself in 2019 because I was good at it.
Thackery Row is a residential property management company. Four hundred and eleven units across Hadley Vale.
If you manage rentals, you hold other people's money. Security deposits, prepaid rent, reserves. In this state that money goes into a client trust account and it is not the company's money and it never becomes the company's money, and there are rules about it that are not complicated and not optional.
I met Caspian at a work thing in 2020. We married in 2021. I kept my job and I kept my name and both of those were, at the time, treated as slightly eccentric.
In the January of last year, in a Tuesday management meeting, I asked a question.
Not an accusation. A question, out loud, in front of six people, about why the trust account reconciliation had been signed off by Adelaide in December when it had historically been signed by me, and why the closing balance was about four hundred thousand dollars lower than the deposit liability I was carrying.
Adelaide said there had been a timing difference on a transfer and that she would get me the detail.
Three weeks later I was moved.
Not demoted. Moved, in the warmest possible way, to a newly created role on the marketing and leasing side, because — Adelaide said, in her office, with tea — I was wasted in the back office and had a way with people.
