Chapter 5 - The Web Unravels
By Wednesday afternoon, the sheriff’s process server had done his job.
Vanessa was sitting on the terrace of the Oakridge Country Club, sipping mimosas with three of her socialite friends, when a man in a rumpled suit walked up to her table, dropped a three-hundred-page legal brief onto her plate of Cobb salad, and announced loudly:
“Vanessa Bennett, you are hereby served with a civil summons for five million dollars for defamation per se, alongside an emergency temporary restraining order commanding you to stay five hundred yards away from Lauren Hayes, Michael Hayes, Maya Hayes, and Lily Hayes.”
The scene had been recorded by three different waitstaff members and was already circulating among the Oakridge elite before Vanessa could even wipe the blue cheese dressing off her designer sunglasses.
My phone rang within fifteen minutes.
It was my mother. Her voice was shrill, vibrating with panic.
“Lauren! What are you doing? Have you lost your mind completely?! Vanessa called us in hysterics! The process server served her at the club! In front of the Montgomerys and the Hendersons! Her reputation is completely ruined!”
“Good,” I said calmly, leaning back in my home office chair while scrolling through Grant’s bank statements on my dual monitors. “It matches the state of my jaw, Eleanor.”
“You drop this right now!” she screamed. “Your father is drafting a revision to the family will as we speak! You are completely writing yourself out of fifteen million dollars! Do you hear me? Fifteen million!”
“Eleanor, let me ask you something,” I said, clicking on a PDF document containing a mortgage deed from April of last year. “When was the last time Dad checked the balance of the Bennett Commercial Trust at First Heritage Bank?”
There was a sudden, confused silence on the line.
“What does that have to do with anything? Grant manages those accounts. He has a degree from Duke!”
“Grant dropped out of Duke after three semesters, Eleanor, which Dad paid fifty thousand dollars to hush up,” I replied ruthlessly. “Tell Dad to look at the primary account. Because according to the certified audit in front of me, the current balance of the Bennett Commercial Trust is exactly four thousand, two hundred and twelve dollars.”
“You’re lying,” she gasped, her voice thinning. “You’re just jealous. You’ve always hated Grant because he was the firstborn!”
“Tell Dad to look at the deed for the Shoreline Drive estate,” I continued, reading straight from the county clerk’s official land records. “On May 12th, Grant used his power of attorney to take out a secondary three-million-dollar hard-money loan against the lake house. The monthly payment is forty-two thousand dollars. The grace period expired yesterday. The bank has already initiated foreclosure proceedings.”
The silence that followed was heavy, punctuated only by my mother’s rapid, shallow breathing.
“No...” she whispered. “That’s... that’s not possible. Grant loves that house. He grew up there.”
“Grant owes two million dollars to private offshore bookmakers, Eleanor. He gambled on sports arbitrage, and he lost. Vanessa’s luxury lifestyle was paid for with the money Dad was supposed to use for your long-term nursing care.”
“Shut up! Shut up!” she wailed, in complete psychological denial. “You’re making this up to tear us apart! You’ve always been a monster, Lauren! Even as a child, you were cold! You were ungrateful! We gave you everything!”
“You gave me a fifty-dollar drugstore card on my eighteenth birthday and forgot my graduation,” I said, my voice as level as an aircraft carrier deck. “Grant gets the consequences of his own actions. And Vanessa gets her day in court. Do not call this number again.”
I ended the call, set the phone on the desk, and turned back to the screen.
Beside me, Michael walked into the room carrying two cups of chamomile tea. He set one in front of me, leaning down to rest his chin on top of my head.
“The girls are doing their homework,” he said softly. “Maya told me she wants to join the junior track team. She said she wants to be fast like you.”
The coldness in my chest melted instantly. I reached up and covered his hand with mine. “Did she mention the barbecue?”
“Not once,” Michael said. “She knows who her parents are. But Grant just pulled up outside.”
I looked through the window blinds.
May you like
A sleek black Mercedes was idling aggressively at the curb of our quiet suburban street. The driver’s side door swung open, and Grant stepped out, his tie loosened, his shirt untucked, looking like a man who was drowning in five feet of water.
***
