My family called me a failure and laughed when I threatened to walk away, but one decision I made that night sent them into absolute panic by morning.

The notice arrived by process server on Thursday morning at 11:30.

It was not from the bank. It was from the law firm of *Kaufman, Klein & Trevor*—a storefront legal operation located above a dry cleaner in Skokie.

Katherine sat in Elena Morales’s office on the forty-fourth floor of the Franklin Center in the Loop. Through the floor-to-ceiling glass, the city of Chicago stretched out beneath them like a circuit board, the gray lake meeting the gray sky in an invisible horizon.

Elena Morales—a woman of forty with sharp, dark eyes, silver hair cut into an asymmetrical bob, and a reputation for making commercial litigators weep in settlement conferences—was turning the four-page document between her fingers.

"It’s amateurish," Elena said, tossing it onto the marble conference table. "It reads like something your brother downloaded from a legal templates site and paid a seventy-year-old tax attorney five hundred dollars to sign."

"What does it claim?" Katherine asked.

"It claims an equitable partnership," Elena said, tapping the first page. "Your father and brother are asserting that *Apex Facilities Group* was founded using 'seed capital and proprietary commercial goodwill' derived from *The Brass Lantern, Inc.* They’re alleging that an informal family partnership was established in 2014, and therefore forty-nine percent of the equity in Apex belongs to the Sinclair family trust."

Katherine let out a short, dry breath. "Dad gave me twelve hundred dollars in 2014. It was a check from his personal account for my twenty-first birthday. I used it to buy my first three-stage carpet extractor."

"Did you sign a note?"

"No."

"Did you issue shares?"

"No. Apex was incorporated as a single-member LLC three months later. I was the sole organizer. Every tax return for ten years lists me as one hundred percent owner."

"Did they ever participate in management?"

"Trevor came to the warehouse twice. Once to ask if he could borrow my trailer to haul a jet ski, and once yesterday to threaten me."

Elena smiled, leaning back in her leather chair. "Then this is what we call an *act of terroristic litigation*. It has no legal merit. If we went before a chancery judge, it would be dismissed in twenty minutes with Rule 137 sanctions against the attorney who signed it."

"Then why did they file it?"

"Because," Elena said, her finger tapping the second page, "they filed an emergency motion for a temporary restraining order to freeze your commercial operating accounts pending an accounting."

Katherine’s spine went rigid.

"Can they do that?"

"If the judge is lazy and signs an ex parte order before we can respond? Yes. For about forty-eight hours. Until we get a hearing."

"Forty-eight hours," Katherine said, her mind instantly computing the calendar. "Tomorrow is Friday. Tomorrow is the first of the month. Tomorrow at three o'clock, the payroll file for three hundred people has to clear through Northern Trust. If that account is frozen for forty-eight hours, three hundred checks bounce."

Her drivers. Her cleaning crews. The women who worked six hours a night scrubbing toilets in office parks after their kids were in bed, living paycheck to paycheck on eleven hundred dollars every two weeks.

"They don't want the company," Katherine whispered. "They want to kill the payroll."

"They want to force you to the table," Elena said. "They think if you’re facing three hundred furious employees and three municipal contract defaults by five o'clock tomorrow, you’ll sign the Lantern guarantee just to get them to release the TRO."

Katherine stood up.

The view from the forty-fourth floor didn't look like a circuit board anymore. It looked like an arena.

"Who’s the judge?"

"Judge Halloway. Sixth District. Markham."

"Is he lazy?"

Elena picked up her pen. "He’s seventy-two. He likes golf, he hates paperwork, and he usually signs emergency motions presented by local attorneys if they look like family disputes because he wants them to settle in the hallway."

"We’re not settling," Katherine said.

"Katherine, if we go to Markham tomorrow morning, we can fight the TRO. But Trevor’s attorney filed the motion under an emergency docket for two o'clock this afternoon. They didn't serve you until eleven-thirty to make sure we couldn't get our response brief bound."

Elena stood up, her briefcase already open on the credenza.

"We have two hours and twenty minutes to get to the Markham courthouse," Elena said. "I have my associate pulling your corporate filings and the cancellation of that twelve-hundred-dollar check right now. Do you have your bank statements from 2014?"

"I have everything," Katherine said. "I have every tax return, every receipt, and every cancelled invoice since the day I registered the name."