“If you walk out that door, don’t ever come back,” Dad said. I looked around the table, smiled, and said, “You’ll regret saying that long before I do.” Three years later, Mom was crying on my porch.

I took a picture of it.

Then I put it back in the trash.

That Sunday, Mom called.

Her voice had that particular quality it gets when she’s been rehearsing what to say.

“Preston, your father would like you to come to dinner. He thinks you two need to talk.”

“Is this a talk, Mom, or is this another announcement?”

Silence.

Then quietly.

“He’s already told Wade he’s in. It’s done, honey. Can’t you just accept it and move forward? You boys can run it together. Together as a family.”

“Mom, does Dad even know what the operating agreement says?”

Another silence.

Longer this time.

“What do you mean?”

“Ask him. Ask him to read the document he signed in 2019. Every page. Then call me back.”

She never called back, which told me everything I needed to know.

Dad hadn’t read it.

Probably wouldn’t.

And Wade was already ordering business cards for a position that required my written consent to create.

Chapter 5: Documenting the power struggle

The next Monday, I installed a security camera in the office.

Small, wireless, pointed at the desk and the filing cabinet.

Legal in our state for a business owner to monitor their own property.

I also changed the passwords on the accounting software.

I told nobody except Mara, and I waited.

The next 6 weeks were an education in how people behave when they think they’re untouchable.

I showed up every day, ran the jobs, managed the crews, kept the clients happy.

From the outside, nothing had changed.

Preston was still the machine that kept Carver Construction running.

But inside the office, Wade was building his own little kingdom, and Dad was helping him do it.

Week three, Wade convinced Dad to buy a new truck.

Not a work truck.

A $62,000 Denali with leather seats and a premium sound system.

He called it a client relations vehicle.

Dad wrote the check from the company account without asking me, which was technically within his rights for purchases under the $100,000 threshold.

But it told me something.

They weren’t thinking about the business.

They were thinking about themselves.

Week four, Wade renegotiated a contract with one of our subcontractors.

Except he didn’t renegotiate it.

He agreed to a 15% rate increase because the sub’s owner took him to lunch and told him the old rate was below market.

It wasn’t.

I’d benchmarked it 6 months ago.

That one lunch cost us roughly $28,000 over the life of the contract.

I documented everything.

Every expense Wade approved, every client he contacted, every crew member he tried to poach into his corner.

I kept a spreadsheet on my personal laptop, timestamped and detailed.

Not because I’m paranoid.

Because when you’re the managing member of an LLC and someone is misrepresenting their authority to clients and vendors, you have a fiduciary responsibility to keep records.

Also, I knew I’d need receipts.

You always need receipts.

The security camera in the office was the real gold mine, though.

Not because it caught anything illegal.

It caught something worse.

It caught incompetence.

Wade came into the office most mornings around 9:30, sometimes 10.

He’d make coffee, scroll his phone for about 45 minutes, then start making calls.

Most of the calls were personal.

I could see him laughing, leaning back in the chair, feet on the desk.

He made maybe two or three actual business calls a day.

The rest was him playing CEO.

But the footage from November 15th was different.

That’s when Wade opened the filing cabinet.

He spent about 20 minutes going through the drawers.

He pulled out the folder labeled LLC operating agreement and sat down with it.

I watched him read.

I watched his face change.

He went from casual browsing to very focused.

Very quickly, he read certain pages twice.

Then he took out his phone and made a call.

I couldn’t hear the audio.

The camera was video only, but I didn’t need to hear it.

Based on the timeline, he called Dad because 20 minutes after he hung up, Dad called me.

“Preston, I need to see those LLC papers.”

“They’re in the office filing cabinet. You know where it is.”

“I want you to explain them to me.”

“Dad, you signed them. I explained them at the time.”

“That was 3 years ago. Things are different now.”

“The documents aren’t different. They say exactly what they said when you signed them.”

He hung up on me.

Classic Ray.

That night, Mara and I had what she calls a kitchen table summit.

She poured wine.

I pulled up the spreadsheet.

We went through everything.

“So, the way I see it,” Mara said, leaning on the counter, “they just figured out that they can’t actually add Wade without your approval.”

“Correct.”