MY MIL KICKED ME OUT FOR HER PREGNANT GRANDCHILD—THEN FOUND OUT I PAID THE $9,800 RENT AND OWNS EVERYTHING INSIDE

The deposition broke for an afternoon recess, but the momentum had shifted irrevocably. In the private breakout room down the hall, I could hear the muffled, frantic shouts of Julian and the sharp, venomous rebukes of Jonathan Cross.

"You told me she didn't keep records from that long ago!" Cross hissed through the mahogany door. "You told me the documents were lost when the Montgomery holding company folded!"

"I thought they were!" Julian’s voice cracked with a pathetic, desperate whimper. "She was just a doctor! She worked eighty hours a week! How was I supposed to know she kept every single ledger from fifteen years ago?"

"Because she isn't an idiot, Julian," Cross sneered. "Unlike you."

Marcus walked beside me down the corridor, carrying two bottles of chilled water. A quiet smile played at the corners of his lips. "I think Mr. Cross is realizing that his investment in Julian's grudge was a remarkably poor allocation of capital."

"Jonathan Cross didn't build his fortune by retreating when an initial gambit fails," I observed thoughtfully. "He’s a vulture. If Julian’s claims collapse, Cross will look for another angle. He didn't fund this just to help Julian get petty revenge. Cross wants our European distribution rights."

Just then, Eleanor exited the conference room, her tablet in hand. Her expression was uncharacteristically grave.

"Sarah, Marcus. We need to step back inside for a moment. We just received an emergency transmission from our forensic accounting team in Jersey City."

We followed Eleanor back into the room. She closed the heavy doors and placed her tablet on the center of the table, bringing up a series of scanned, aged financial records marked with the official seal of the New Jersey Department of Banking and Insurance.

"While pulling the dissolution records for the Montgomery Trust to refute Julian's patent claim," Eleanor explained, "our investigators cross-referenced the corporate routing numbers Julian used during the final six months of your marriage. We discovered that Aethelgard Capital wasn't an outside party that Julian contacted last month."

Marcus leaned forward, his eyes narrowing. "What do you mean?"

"Fifteen years ago," Eleanor said, "Jonathan Cross was the silent managing partner of the private lending fund that held the secondary mezzanine debt on the Upper East Side building you lived in. Cross was the one who authorized the predatory loan Julian took out against his mother’s assets. Julian didn't lose his inheritance to bad crypto investments, Sarah. He lost it to Cross."