Chapter 6 - The Ultimate Plot Twist
Three weeks later, the final blow landed. And it didn't even come from me.
I was sitting in a local cafe having brunch when my phone chimed with a legal alert. Because I had previously helped my parents set up their digital estate and financial tracking during their first bankruptcy scare, I still received public record alerts associated with their address.
It was a foreclosure and eviction notice, but it wasn't from the bank.
It was from a private investment firm called Apex Residential Holdings.
I frowned, clicking on the filing documents. As I scrolled through the legal text, my jaw slowly dropped. A wild, hysterical laugh escaped my lips, drawing looks from the people at the neighboring tables.
My parents didn't own the house anymore. They hadn't owned it for six months.
According to the deed transfer documents, Mason had secretly convinced my father—who was suffering from early-stage memory lapses and signed anything put in front of him—to sign over a quitclaim deed to him back in January under the pretense of "protecting the asset from taxes."
The moment Mason got his name on the deed, he didn't use it to build a family. He immediately took out a hard-money equity loan of $150,000 against the house from Apex Residential Holdings to fund a cryptocurrency trading scam he’d found on Discord.
He had lost every single penny within three weeks.
Mason hadn't been trying to move into the house because he was "starting a family." He had been trying to move in because the investment firm was already threatening to seize the property, and he thought if he and a pregnant woman were living there, the eviction process would be legally delayed.
He had lied to my parents, told them I was the one trying to steal the house, and convinced them to kick me out so he could take control of the property before the firm found out he had defaulted on the loan.
But because I had pulled the plug on the utilities and stopped the primary mortgage payments, the house became unlivable, Chloe left him, and the investment firm discovered the primary mortgage was in default. They accelerated the foreclosure.
The entire scam collapsed on itself.
The next day, the story hit the local news. Mason was arrested at a cheap motel on charges of grand theft, elder financial abuse, and forgery, after my father frantically turned him in to the police in a desperate bid to void the deed transfer.
The house was seized by the bank. My parents were given exactly forty-eight hours to clear out their personal belongings before the locks were changed by the sheriff's department.
They had nothing left. No money, no car, no credit, and no daughter.
On the day of their eviction, I received one final text message from an unknown number. It was my mother, using a cheap burner phone.
“Hannah. They are taking the house today. We are sitting on the sidewalk with our suitcases. We have nowhere to go. Please. Just a hotel room. Just for one week. We are your parents.”
I read the message. I looked at the little scar on my finger from when I was twenty-two, working sixteen-hour days to pay off their debts, missing my own college graduation because I couldn't afford the cap and gown after buying my mother a new refrigerator.
I didn't block the number. I wanted her to see that I read it.
I typed out my final response:
May you like
"You told me thirty years was long enough to live off you. I agree. Ten years was long enough to live off me. Good luck, Vera. I hope the dignity was worth it."
I hit send. Then, I turned off my phone, took a deep breath of the fresh, clean air of my new life, and walked down the street to buy myself a birthday cake.
