> His buy-out of her shares was a poorly communicated effort to remove the business from between them and to attempt to salvage their familial bond. Hildegard instead saw it as a financial assault on herself and resorted to communicating with her own son through lawyers, even after the transaction was completed.

Of course the action did not worked to salvage communication between them? How can one possibly expect better communication after hostile buyout and firing? Whatever her flaws as mother, the subsequent communication only through layers after that seems to me as not just expected, but even reasonable.

I mean, him doing that might have been rational business decision if she was doing job badly, I dont want to judge that. But expecting the relationships to improve after that sounds completely absurd.