For six years, I cared for eighty-two-year-old Mrs. Sun-Hee Choi in her Richmond District apartment in San Francisco, refusing every envelope of cash she handed me.
Rachel Adler called my burner phone two days later. “Meet me at the Lucky Boat diner in Chinatown. Thirty minutes. Don’t use your regular cell.”
Her voice was tight, urgent. I knew it was about Oakes. My regular phone had been ringing non-stop with unknown numbers, likely more process servers, and I couldn’t access my bank account to pay for anything. The burner phone was a lifeline.
The diner was bustling, the clatter of chopsticks and murmur of conversations filling the air. The smell of fried noodles and dim sum hung heavy. Rachel was already seated in a back booth, nursing a cup of tea. She wore a practical trench coat, her notepad and pen already on the table. She looked tired, her eyes a little too bright.
I slid into the seat opposite her. “What did you find?”
She pushed a small plate of sesame balls toward me. “Eat something. You look like you haven’t slept.”
I shook my head, my focus entirely on her.
She sighed, then pulled a printout from her bag. It was another set of legal documents, court filings this time, but from a different jurisdiction. “I’ve been digging deeper into Oakes’s finances. Specifically, the debts of his foundation.”
“His foundation is in trouble, I know,” I said, recalling her earlier warning. “You said $850,000 in foreclosures.”
“Worse than that, actually, but not what I’m here to tell you.” She pushed the document across the table. “Look at this. This isn’t a debt statement. This is a wire transfer record.”
My eyes scanned the page. It was a bank record, dated five years ago.
**Sender:** Julian Oakes.
**Amount:** $200,000.
**Recipient:** Seoul International Credit Recovery Syndicate.
My heart pounded against my ribs. The same syndicate. The same one I’d found mentioned in Min-Jae Choi’s demand letters in Mrs. Choi’s attic.
“Five years ago,” I breathed, the significance of the date hitting me. “Before I even met Mrs. Choi.”
Rachel nodded, her expression grim. “He personally wired two hundred thousand dollars of his own private savings to that Korean collections agent. Not his foundation’s money. His personal funds.”
“Why?” I asked, my voice barely a whisper. “Why would he pay off Min-Jae’s debts?”
“The filings indicate it was to ‘settle immediate domestic obligations’ and ‘delay foreign lien attachments’,” Rachel explained, tapping a line on the document. “Basically, he kept the wolves from Mrs. Choi’s door. Paid off enough to make the syndicate back off, at least for a while. He was protecting her.”
A cold wave of realization washed over me. Master Oakes had not just been Mrs. Choi’s husband’s apprentice, a respected figure in the community. He had been intimately involved in Mrs. Choi’s most dangerous secret, protecting her from her son’s ruinous debts, long before I ever entered her life.
He was not just a greedy mentor trying to seize assets. He was a man with a hidden, deeper connection to Mrs. Choi’s family and their troubles. His actions, his current lawsuit, his attempt to freeze Mrs. Choi’s assets, began to take on a terrifying new dimension.
He knew about the syndicate. He knew about the debts. He knew Mrs. Choi’s deepest, most dangerous secret. And he had paid out of his own pocket to protect her.
This wasn’t a simple case of a corrupt mentor trying to steal an inheritance. This was a deliberate, complicated play. The question was: what game was Master Oakes truly playing? And who was he really fighting?
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