Chapter 3 - The Freefall
The next forty-eight hours were a blur of flashbulbs, subpoenas, and lawyers. Grant’s empire, built on a foundation of sand, began to wash away. The Gazette published the story with the headline: THE WHITMORE DECEPTION: A FOUNDATION OF LIES.
Grant tried to isolate himself in our penthouse, but the locks had been changed. The penthouse, as it turned out, was solely in my name, a gift from my grandfather that Grant had conveniently forgotten about during our early years. When he arrived, keys in hand, he found his belongings in designer luggage on the sidewalk.
I stood on the balcony, looking down as he paced. He saw me and shouted, his voice hoarse. "You’ll regret this, Avery! You’ll have nothing! I’ll strip you of every cent!"
"You can't strip what you never owned, Grant," I called down. "The trust is locked. The auditors are at your office. And the police are likely already waiting for you at the airport."
May you like
Sloane appeared an hour later, looking disheveled and frantic. She didn't look like a woman in love anymore; she looked like a woman who had bet everything on a sinking ship. She banged on the front door, demanding to be let in, demanding money, demanding answers. I didn't open it. I went to the nursery—the one I had designed for our hypothetical future—and began to pack away the memories. I wasn't doing it with sadness, but with a strange, clinical detachment.
I had been a ghost in my own life for so long that watching it disintegrate felt like waking up from a fever dream.
