Chapter 11 - The Fall of the House of Hale
The public relations blast had done exactly what Marcus and I designed it to do: it turned the Hales into social pariahs overnight. The very next morning, the Maple Ridge Country Club issued a formal statement "suspending" both Margaret and Daniel’s memberships pending the outcome of the criminal trial. For Margaret, this was a fate worse than death. Her entire identity was built on sipping chardonnay on that veranda, looking down on the rest of the town.
By mid-week, the first real crack in Margaret’s fortress appeared.
I was sitting in Marcus’s office when his desk phone rang. He put it on speaker. It was the vice president of Licking County National Bank.
"Mr. Vance, we’ve received your client’s partition lawsuit regarding the Hale property on Oak Ridge Drive," the banker said, sounding exhausted. "And we’ve also received a call from Mrs. Margaret Hale. She was... quite hysterical. She wanted to take out a second mortgage on the property to pay off her mounting legal fees and buy out Dr. Carter’s equity."
Marcus smiled, his pen tapping against his mahogany desk. "And what did you tell her, Bill?"
"We had to deny her, of course. Her debt-to-income ratio is a disaster. She has no active income, and her co-signer—Dr. Carter—is the one suing her. Without Dr. Carter's signature, we can't approve a dime. In fact, we are officially initiating foreclosure proceedings. The mortgage is sixty days past due as of today."
"Excellent," Marcus said. "We will let the foreclosure run its course. It will save us the court fees of forcing a partition sale. Dr. Carter will buy the house back at the sheriff’s auction for pennies on the dollar, just to clean the slate."
When Marcus hung up, I leaned back, a genuine smile touching my lips for the first time in weeks. "She’s going to lose the house."
"She already has," Marcus replied, sliding a new stack of documents toward me. "And now, it’s time to deal with Daniel’s 'real estate business.' We just got the financial audit back on his LLC."
I pulled the documents closer. "What did you find?"
"Daniel hasn't brokered a real estate deal in twenty-four months, Evelyn. Do you know what he was actually doing with the 'marketing funds' you were transferring to his business account?"
I braced myself. "Tell me."
"He was paying off the credit card debts of a twenty-four-year-old 'aesthetician' named Tiffany who lives in a luxury high-rise in Columbus. He bought her a leased Mercedes under your dental clinic's tax ID number. It’s not just marital misconduct, Evelyn. It’s tax fraud, and it's embezzlement of corporate funds."
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My chest tightened, but not from the pain of my broken ribs. It was the cold, hard realization of just how blind I had been. I had been working eighty-hour weeks, extracting teeth, managing infections, and running three clinics, while my husband was using my hard-earned money to play sugar daddy to another woman.
"Marcus," I said, my voice barely a whisper, but vibrating with a terrifying intensity. "I don't just want a divorce. I want him in a orange jumpsuit."
