Chapter 5 - The Financial Guillotine
They were escorted out into the freezing Portland rain with nothing but a few trash bags full of clothes, exactly how they had treated Clara.
The next morning, Mark’s nightmare truly began.
We had completely seized control of the narrative. When Mark tried to log into his bank accounts to hire a defense attorney, he was greeted with red error screens. The bank, alerted by Harrison’s rock-solid proof of the forged deed, had locked down every single asset tied to Mark’s name.
Desperate, Mark tried to go to his startup's office, only to find the doors padlocked by the property manager for failure to pay rent—the money he had been using to pay it was now frozen in the fraud investigation.
My phone rang at noon. It was Mark.
“Please,” he begged, his voice cracking. He sounded pathetic, a far cry from the arrogant man who had thrown his wife into the streets. “Please, Joanne. I made a mistake. I was stressed about the business. Brenda pushed me into it. I’ll pay you back. I’ll sign whatever you want. Just tell the lawyers to back off. I have nowhere to sleep.”
I put the phone on speaker so Clara could hear.
“You slept fine when you forced my daughter and grandson to sleep in a grocery store parking lot,” I said icily.
“Clara, baby, please!” Mark cried out. “Tell her to stop! I’m the father of your child!”
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Clara leaned toward the phone, her voice dripping with ice. “You lost the right to call yourself a father the second you let us freeze in that car. Have a nice life, Mark. Or what’s left of it.”
She reached forward and ended the call herself. I had never been prouder.
