Chapter 4 - The Ultimatum
My mother’s breath hitched. “What do you mean?”
“Before Ethan died, he compiled all of this,” I said, tapping the thick blue folder. “He was preparing to hand it over to the forensic unit at his firm to initiate a formal identity theft report. He hesitated because he knew what it would do to me to see my own mother and brother go to prison. He wanted to give you a chance to confess and dissolve the entities legally.”
I closed the folder with a sharp thud. “But Ethan is gone now. And I don’t share his hesitation.”
The silence in the foyer was absolute. The faint ticking of the grandfather clock in the living room sounded like a countdown.
My mother’s face was entirely ghost white now, the tan she had brought back from the Caribbean looking like a sickly, artificial mask. “Maya… you wouldn’t. We are your parents. Julian is your brother. You can’t destroy your own family over a few financial adjustments.”
“You destroyed my family when you decided a tropical beach was more important than saying goodbye to Ethan and Chloe,” I said. The mention of my daughter’s name brought a sudden, sharp ache to my throat, but I forced it down, letting the coldness anchor me. “You didn’t care about my family when you left me to stand by those graves alone. Why should I care about yours?”
Julian took a step toward me, his hands raised in a rare gesture of submission. “Maya, look, let’s talk about this. We can fix it. I can dissolve the LLCs. We can transfer the debt back to my name. Just don’t do anything crazy. If you file a police report for identity theft, the bank will call in the current restaurant loan immediately. I’ll lose everything.”
“You’ve already lost it, Julian,” I said.
I reached into the pocket of my cardigan and pulled out my phone. I unlocked the screen and held it up for them to see. There was an open email interface, addressed to the regional director of the Internal Revenue Service’s Criminal Investigation Division, with a blind copy to the state attorney’s fraud unit. Attached to the email were digital scans of every single page in the blue folder.
My mother gasped, lunging forward to snatch the phone from my hand, but I stepped back smoothly, my father catching her arm before she could make contact.
“Eleanor, stop!” my father roared, his voice cracking with a mix of shame and panic. He looked at me, tears welling in his aged eyes. “Maya… please. I didn’t know the extent of this. I swear to you, I thought your mother was just helping Julian with some shifting assets. I didn’t know they used your identity. I didn’t know about the forgery.”
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“Then you should have looked closer, Dad,” I said, looking at him with a faint tinge of pity, but no mercy. “You spent thirty years looking the other way because it was easier than confronting her. Your silence made you an accomplice.”
I hovered my thumb over the blue ‘Send’ icon on the screen.
