Chapter 4 - The Midnight Audit
By 2:00 AM, we were back home. Frederick was finally sleeping peacefully in his crib, his fever breaking under the influence of intravenous antibiotics and fever reducers administered at the hospital.
Amy was asleep on the living room sofa, curled into a ball with one of my old flannel shirts pulled tight around her shoulders. She was utterly exhausted, drained of every ounce of energy she possessed.
I sat at the kitchen island under the harsh glare of a single overhead light, with Mason’s confiscated manila folder spread out before me alongside my laptop.
For the past three years, I had trusted my mother implicitly. As a construction engineer working sixty-hour weeks on commercial skyscraper projects across Tennessee, I was rarely home before dark. When Frederick was born, my mother had volunteered to manage our household finances, claiming that Amy—who was recovering from a difficult pregnancy—was overwhelmed.
*“Just let me handle the bills, Connor,”* Teresa had told me over Sunday pot roast a year ago. “You make the money; I’ll make it stretch.”
So, I set up an automatic wire transfer of three thousand dollars every month straight into her private account, on top of the mortgage payments I covered directly.
I opened my bank portal, logging into the master corporate and personal accounts. I ran a forensic search on the last thirty-six months of transactions.
What I saw made my stomach turn inside out.
The three thousand dollars a month hadn't gone toward groceries, diapers, or baby formula. It had been funneled into high-risk stock portfolios registered under Bradley Holdings LLC—a company my mother had secretly incorporated without my knowledge. Worse still, over the last six months, she had taken out three separate equity lines of credit against my house, forging my signature on every single document with the help of a corrupt local notary public named Marcus Vance.
My phone buzzed violently on the counter. It was an incoming call from an unlisted number.
I swiped to answer.
May you like
“Connor?” My mother’s voice crackled through the speaker, harsh and demanding, even from a holding cell at the precinct. “You get down here right now and bail me out! Do you have any idea what these officers are putting me through? They took my phone, they took my purse, and some idiot cop put me in a cell with a woman who smells like cheap gin!”
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