Chapter 7
An hour later, an unknown number called.
I answered.
“Harper? Harper, is that you?”
It was Mason.
His voice sounded smaller than I remembered.
“What do you want, Mason?”
“Did you really kick Mom and Dad out?” he demanded, trying to sound tough and failing. “Dad just called me crying. This is insane. They’re older, Harper. You need to fix this right now or I swear—”
“Or what, Mason?” I interrupted. “You’ll build an app to stop me?”
Silence.
“Oh, wait,” I said. “You can’t code.”
He breathed hard into the phone.
“You took $400,000 of their mortgage money,” I continued. “Then you burned through their retirement, their credit, and their trust. You spent their future on ice sculptures, luxury office space, and a Tesla you could not afford.”
“I was trying to build an empire,” he said defensively. “Startups take time.”
“Startups take talent,” I said. “Something you have never possessed.”
“Harper—”
“You are not a founder, Mason. You are a performance. You always have been. And now Mom and Dad have finally paid full price for the show.”
His voice cracked.
“Where are they supposed to go? I live in a studio. I can’t take them in.”
“I guess you should learn how to fold out a sofa bed,” I said. “They’re your problem now. You were the golden boy. Time to shine.”
Then I hung up on him too.
That afternoon, I walked into Charles Sterling’s office and handed him the finalized eviction report.
“The Lynwood property has been secured,” I told him. “It will hit the market tomorrow. Based on acquisition cost and projected sale value, we stand to make a significant return.”
Charles reviewed the report.
Then he looked up at me with a grin that would have frightened a weaker person.
“Excellent work, Harper,” he said. “Ruthless. Efficient. Exactly what this firm needs.”
I said nothing.
“That is why I’m fast-tracking you for junior partner.”
I smiled.
Not widely.
Just enough.
I walked out of his office and down the hallway to the floor-to-ceiling windows. The New York City skyline stretched in front of me, sharp and bright in the setting sun. Gold light poured between the buildings. The city looked impossible and indifferent, which made me love it more.
I did not feel guilty.
I did not feel sad.
I felt weightless.
For twenty-five years, I had begged for a seat at my parents’ table. I had exhausted myself trying to prove my worth to people who were determined not to see me.
But I did not need their table anymore.
I had built my own.
And I owned the building it sat in.
The house on Elmwood Drive did not stay on the market long.
We sold it at auction three weeks later to a young, hard-working couple expecting their first child. They were both teachers, from what I remember in the closing notes. They had saved for years. They walked through the house and saw crown molding, a fireplace, a backyard, and a nursery waiting to happen.
They did not know its history.
They did not need to.
To them, it was a fresh start.
To my firm, it was a successful liquidation.
Because we had purchased my parents’ defaulted debt at a steep discount, the sale generated a net profit of over $300,000 for Sterling and Vance.
The day the funds cleared, Charles Sterling called me into his office again.
This time, he did not just offer a handshake.
He handed me a performance bonus check for $75,000 and officially promoted me to junior partner.
At twenty-six years old, I became the youngest partner in the history of the firm.
While I was moving into a larger corner office and buying my first major piece of real estate, a two-bedroom penthouse overlooking Central Park, my family was experiencing a different kind of lifestyle change.
I did not have to look hard to find out what happened to them.
Small-town gossip always finds its way to the city.
May you like
With zero savings, damaged credit, and no house, my parents had no choice but to move into Mason’s apartment.
But Mason no longer had the luxury office or the illusion of wealth. He was renting a four-hundred-square-foot studio in a worn-down building in Queens.
