Chapter 5 - The Collapse of the Golden Child
Paige froze, the blood draining from her cheeks until she looked like a corpse in a designer coat.
"What?" she choked out, her breath hitching in her throat. "That's... that's not true. Drew texted me this morning from his office."
"Drew doesn't have an office, Paige," I said, pulling my smartphone from my pocket and opening an email Marcus’s attorney had copied to me an hour ago. "Drew Miller is an alias. His real name is Andrew Kowalski. He has three outstanding bench warrants for commercial check fraud in North Carolina."
Paige grabbed the counter edge to keep from collapsing onto the floor. "No... no, no, no..."
"He used your name to open the merchant accounts, Paige," I continued, reading directly from the police report. "Every single lease in Scott's Addition, every equipment contract for that wine bar, is signed solely in your name. He took the sixty-four thousand from Marcus, took Dad’s forty thousand, and cleaned out the operating account at midnight."
My mother let out a high-pitched wail, sliding off her chair onto her knees, clutching the hem of Paige's coat.
"Oh, my God! My baby! What did he do to you?" Eleanor sobbed, rocking back and forth. "Arthur, we have to call the police! We have to get her money back!"
"It isn't her money, Eleanor!" Dad finally roared, slamming his fist onto the laminate counter with a sound that shook the cabinets.
The entire kitchen fell dead silent.
I had never heard my father raise his voice like that in thirty-three years.
He stood tall, his eyes burning with an agonizing mixture of heartbreak and fierce, final clarity.
"It was Marcus's money," Dad said, his voice deep, gravelly, and unyielding. "It was my retirement money. It was the money I saved by skipping dental appointments and wearing twenty-year-old boots to the freight yard."
Dad looked down at my mother kneeling on the linoleum, then up at Paige.
"And you sat at that Sunday dinner table two days ago," Dad continued, his finger pointing at Paige, "and you let your mother demand ten thousand dollars from Jacob. Your brother, who worked forty hours a week at the lumber yard to pay for his own books."
Paige began weeping hysterically, sliding down against the refrigerator until she was sitting on the floor with her knees pulled to her chest.
"I didn't know, Dad! I swear I didn't know Drew was a criminal! I thought he loved me!"
"You didn't care who he was, Paige," Dad said coldly. "As long as someone else was paying the bill."
Dad turned to me, his weathered face softening with a look of profound, unpayable shame.
"Jacob," Dad whispered, his chin trembling. "Can you help me look at the loan papers? I don't know what to do."
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I stepped around my sobbing mother, put my arm around my father’s trembling shoulders, and guided him toward his desk in the living room.
"I've got you, Dad," I said softly. "I'll take care of it."
