Chapter 7 - The Collapse of the Parasites
Within forty-eight hours of Michael’s eviction, the dominoes in the Vance family fortress began to collapse with the satisfying precision of a demo team bringing down an unsafe building.
Marcus Vance and his team didn't just freeze Michael’s personal accounts; they executed a comprehensive forensic audit of every dime that had flowed out of my corporate subsidiaries over the past twenty-four months.
The results were staggering even to my hardened legal team.
Not only had Michael been siphoning $1,500 a month to his mother, but he had also secretly established a secondary corporate line of credit under a phantom consulting fee, funneling over $120,000 into a hidden account controlled jointly by Linda and Robert to pay off their overdue mortgage, Linda’s credit card debt, and even a luxury vacation to Cancun they had taken last spring while telling me they were visiting sick relatives.
By Wednesday afternoon, Linda was calling my office thirty times an hour. Her voicemails—saved automatically by our corporate switchboard—transitioned rapidly from furious, screaming tirades calling me a monster, a bitch, and a heartless harpy, down to pathetic, sobbing apologies begging me to reconsider for the sake of “family.”
I didn't listen to a single second of them. I forwarded every audio file directly to Marcus to attach as exhibits for the upcoming civil fraud hearing.
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As for Michael, his corporate sponsors didn't wait for the trial. The moment HayesTech’s legal department issued a formal press release detailing the internal fraud investigation and asset recovery lawsuit, Michael’s employer—a mid-tier logistics firm where he held his nominal day job—placed him on indefinite suspension pending criminal inquiry.
His friends—the ones who had slapped him on the back at our wedding and praised him for landing such a successful wife—mysteriously stopped returning his calls. Without my money, without his luxury car, without his Bel-Air lifestyle, Michael Vance was suddenly forced to confront the horrifying reality of who he actually was: an empty, talentless con man who had finally run out of marks.
