Chapter 6 - The Unraveling of Evelyn
While the corporate world adjusted to my return, the secondary ripple effects of Garrett’s collapse were tearing through his family like a wildfire.
Evelyn Sullivan—Garrett’s mother—sat in the small, cramped living room of her sister’s house in Staten Island.
Her luxury three-story townhouse in Greenwich, Connecticut, had been formally seized by federal Marshals forty-eight hours earlier after investigators discovered Garrett had paid the mortgage using secondary offshore accounts tied to his wire fraud indictment.
Her credit cards were declined. Her high-society friends at the country club had blocked her phone number. The woman who had spent years boasting about her son’s grand fortune was now living out of two suitcases on her sister’s velvet sofa.
My phone rang as I sat in my new office at Hartwell Logic, reviewing product roadmap files with Julian.
I looked at the caller ID. It was Evelyn.
Julian looked up from his iPad, his eyebrow raised. "Do you want me to block it?"
"No," I said calmly. "I’ll take it."
I slid the icon across the screen and held the phone to my ear. "Hello, Evelyn."
"Rebecca!" Evelyn’s voice shrilled through the speaker, high-pitched, shaky, and full of frantic, desperate panic. "Rebecca, thank God you answered! You have to help us! The federal Marshals took my house! They took my car! I have nothing left!"
"I am aware, Evelyn," I replied flatly.
"You can't let them do this to me!" Evelyn wept. "I am your children's grandmother! How is it going to look for Emma and Evan when people find out their grandmother is living on welfare?! You have billions now, Rebecca! You can easily buy back my house! You can pay Garrett’s bail!"
I set my pen down on the glass desk, leaning back in my chair.
"Evelyn," I spoke softly, my tone measured and precise. "Do you remember four years ago, when Garrett threw me out of his house?"
Evelyn went silent on the line.
"Do you remember what you said to me on the front porch while I was putting my crying three-year-old twins into a broken Honda Civic?" I asked.
Evelyn swallowed hard. "Rebecca... I was just confused... Garrett told me—"
"You looked me in the eye," I interrupted, my voice dropping into a chilling calm, "and you said: 'A woman who can't hold onto her husband’s interest deserves whatever quiet life she lands in. Don't come back begging for handouts, Rebecca. The Sullivan family doesn't support dead weight.'"
"Rebecca, please..." Evelyn whimpered.
"You called me dead weight, Evelyn," I said. "You watched your son steal my life's work, and you cheered him on because you enjoyed the country club memberships he bought you with my money."
"I'm sick, Rebecca! I'm an old woman!"
"Then I suggest you use state social services," I stated with absolute finality. "Emma and Evan will have everything they ever need in this life. But you will never see them, speak to them, or touch a single penny of my family’s wealth ever again."
I ended the call, set the phone face down on the desk, and looked out over Central Park.
Julian walked over, poured two glasses of sparkling water, and handed one to me.
May you like
"You handled that with remarkable grace," Julian said softly, touching his glass to mine.
"Grace isn't about being weak, Julian," I smiled, taking a sip of the cold water. "Grace is about setting boundaries so strong that toxic people destroy themselves trying to break them."
