Chapter 2 - The Fallouts and Alliances
The campus security office was quiet, smelling faintly of stale coffee and industrial floor cleaner—a stark contrast to the chaotic battlefield of the graduation courtyard. I sat in a plastic chair, a small ice pack pressed against the swelling on my left cheek.
"You're going to press charges, right?" Paige asked, pacing the length of the small room. Her graduation gown was unzipped, flapping behind her like a cape of pure righteous fury. "Audrey, he put his hands on you in front of a thousand people. If you don't press charges, I will personally go out there and throw my diploma at his windshield."
"I'm pressing charges, Paige. For the assault, and for everything else," I said quietly, taking the ice pack away for a second. The skin was tender, but the swelling wasn't bad. The real damage was the one they had done to my life over the last four years, and that was finally being undone.
The heavy wooden door opened, and a tall, sharp-featured man in a tailored gray suit stepped in. It was Detective Marcus Vance—no relation to my family, ironies of ironies—from the state’s financial crimes division. Behind him was Mr. Evelyn, my father’s former chief financial officer, the man who had secretly handed me the encryption keys to the family’s private ledger three months ago after Arthur had unceremoniously fired him to cover up a bad real estate deal.
"Miss Vance," Detective Marcus said, pulling out a chair across from me. He didn't look at me with pity; he looked at me with the intense focus of a hunter who had just been handed the exact coordinates of his target. "The scene outside is a circus. The university has officially requested your parents leave the property, and local police have already detained your father for the physical altercation. But what I care about are these."
He tapped the thick envelope resting on the metal desk between us.
"Mr. Evelyn here has verified the routing numbers," the detective continued, leaning forward. "If these signature logs are as accurate as the digital timestamps suggest, your parents didn't just commit identity theft against you. They used these shell accounts to hide assets from a pending federal bank fraud investigation involving their primary real estate firm, Vance Holdings."
My heart gave a slow, deliberate thud. I had known about the identity theft, the student loans they had blocked, and the credit cards they had opened in my name. But I hadn't realized the depth of the ocean they were drowning in.
"They were using me as a shield," I realized out loud. "If the federal government came after Vance Holdings, the money hidden in the accounts under my name would look like an independent trust or an estranged daughter's independent debt."
"Exactly," Mr. Evelyn chimed in, his voice laced with bitter satisfaction. "Arthur thought he was a genius. He figured that since you were working three jobs and barely keeping your head above water, you’d never have the time or resources to check your comprehensive business credit profiles. He thought you were just a quiet girl who would accept her fate as the family failure."
"He underestimated what four years of isolation can do to a person," I said, a cold edge creeping into my tone. "When you have nothing left to lose, you spend your time watching. You notice every discrepancy. You save every scrap of paper."
"We need you to officially sign the affidavit releasing the cloud server logs you compiled," Detective Marcus said, pushing a document toward me. "Once you sign this, we execute the freeze on all related accounts. That includes the Manhattan penthouse your brother is currently occupying, the corporate lines of credit, and the personal accounts Arthur and Victoria use to maintain their lifestyle."
I took the pen from his hand. For a brief second, the faces of my parents flashed in my mind—the way my mother used to look at me with utter disgust when my clothes weren't expensive enough, the way my father would ignore my existence at the dinner table while praising Julian for merely breathing.
I pressed the pen to the paper and signed my name. Audrey Vance. Not the loser they wanted me to be. Not the sacrifice.
May you like
"It's done," I whispered.
"No," Detective Marcus corrected, a grim smile playing on his lips as he took the paper back. "It's just beginning. By tomorrow morning, your family is going to find out exactly what happens when the foundation of cards they built on your back finally collapses."
