Chapter 5 - The Purging of the Paradise
What followed was twenty-seven minutes of glorious, chaotic retribution.
Darlene lost her mind completely. She ran up the stairs to the master suite, screaming obscenities that echoed off the high vaulted ceilings, furiously shoving her clothes back into her suitcases.
"You ungrateful little viper!" Darlene shrieked from the top of the stairs, her emerald velvet dress bunched up in her hands as she dragged a rolling bag down the hallway. "We took you in! Grant gave you a name! You were nothing before you married my son!"
"Mom, shut up!" Grant yelled, his face sweating profusely as he tried desperately to read through the dozens of legal pages Evelyn had handed him. "She froze the joint account! Mom, she froze the checking account! My credit cards are bouncing!"
"What do you mean frozen?!" Darlene shrieked, dropping a suitcase down the stairs with a loud, wooden thud. "How am I going to pay the movers for my furniture on Friday?!"
"You're not having furniture delivered here, Mrs. Huxley," Deputy Miller called up to her, his hand resting calmly on his belt. "If a moving truck shows up on this driveway, it will be turned away for criminal trespass. I suggest you call a rental truck and haul your belongings somewhere else."
Grant dropped to his knees in front of me, right there on the oak floorboards where he had thrown my clothes four days earlier. The confident, condescending corporate executive was completely gone. In his place was a weeping, terrified boy who realized his free ride had come to a violent, crashing end.
"Tessa, please!" Grant sobbed, grabbing the hem of my dress with shaking hands. "I'll apologize! I'll tell Mom to leave right now! She can go to a hotel! I'll put your clothes back in the master closet! I'll sleep on the couch! I'll sleep on the deck! Just please don't file these papers! If this goes public, my business is finished! I'm ruined!"
I looked down at him, slowly pulling my dress out of his desperate grip.
"Your business was already finished, Grant," I said, my voice steady and cold as steel. "My attorney did a deep dive into your corporate accounts yesterday. You’ve been using money from new clients to pay off old personal debts. You were three weeks away from a federal fraud indictment anyway."
Grant’s jaw dropped. The final card in his house of cards had fallen.
"You... you audited my business?" he whispered, horrified.
"I'm a financial analyst, Grant," I reminded him softly. "Analyzing fraudulent numbers is literally what I do for a living. You spent eight years assuming I was stupid just because I was quiet."
Sheriff Miller checked his watch. "Thirty minutes are up, Mr. Huxley. Mrs. Huxley. Time to step outside."
Darlene came clattering down the stairs, dragging three oversized bags, her wig slightly crooked, her green velvet dress trailing through the dust on the floor. "Grant! Do something! He's putting my bags on the porch!"
"I can't do anything, Mom!" Grant screamed at her, snapping completely. "This was your fault! You insisted on taking her room! You insisted on treating her like a servant! If you had just stayed in the guest room like a normal person, none of this would have happened!"
"My fault?!" Darlene gasped, clutching her chest. "I did everything for you! I built your reputation!"
"You ruined me!" Grant yelled, his voice breaking into a hysterical screech as the deputy guided him toward the front door. "You ruined my life!"
The Sheriff and the deputy ushered both of them out into the damp, foggy Oregon night.
I stood on the front porch, flanked by Evelyn Vance, watching as Grant and Darlene stumbled through the gravel driveway, wrestling with six heavy suitcases, a box of luxury lamps, and Darlene's framed family portraits.
The fog was rolling in thick from the Pacific, dropping the temperature into the low forty-fives. Neither of them had coats.
"Where are we supposed to go?!" Darlene wept, her voice trembling from the icy wind. "Grant, my shoes are ruined! We don't have a hotel room!"
"Get in the car, Mom!" Grant barked, dragging a bag across the dirt. "We'll have to sleep in the SUV!"
"In the car?!" she screamed. "I am a seventy-year-old woman! I can't sleep in an SUV!"
"Well, you're not sleeping in her master suite!" Grant roared back, slamming the rear hatch of the vehicle shut so hard the metal rattled.
They piled into the silver SUV—the leased vehicle that I knew would be repossessed by the dealership within forty-eight hours once my lawyer served them with the asset freeze order. The engine roared to life, tires spitting gravel as Grant backed recklessly out of the driveway and sped away into the dark, foggy night.
The driveway fell quiet.
The sound of their screaming faded into the distance, replaced once more by the eternal, soothing thunder of the Pacific Ocean crashing against the ancient rocks.
Evelyn Vance turned to me, pulling a small silver flask from her pocket and taking a neat sip. "Well, Tessa. That was thoroughly therapeutic."
I looked out into the darkness, taking a long, deep breath of the cold, salty air.
For the first time in eight long years, my chest felt completely light. The suffocating weight of Grant’s arrogance, Darlene’s cruelty, and the endless burden of maintaining their fake life was gone, washed away like footprints in the tide.
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"Thank you, Evelyn," I said.
"Don't thank me yet," Evelyn smiled, wrapping her coat tighter around herself. "We have a court date in three weeks to finalize the asset division. And trust me, Tessa... by the time I'm finished with Grant Huxley, he won't even be able to afford that leased SUV."
