The Heiress he never met
The story broke in the financial press before Preston's office had finished drafting an official statement, which was, Sebastian said grimly over breakfast the morning after the vote, exactly the outcome his father's caution had spent eleven years trying to prevent and exactly the outcome Sebastian had decided, in the end, he could live with. A junior reporter at a business daily had been in the boardroom's outer hallway when the vote concluded, had overheard enough of the raised voices to piece together the shape of what had happened, and by nine that morning the headline had already metastasized across four other outlets: VALE HEIR ADMITS FOUNDING FRAUD DAYS BEFORE NARROW BOARD VICTORY.