Chapter 7 - The Foreclosure and the Fall
Six months after we moved to a sunlit three-bedroom house near the mountains in Denver, the final collapse of my parents' household arrived.
Emily had filed for divorce shortly after our confrontation in Scottsdale. Refusing to be complicit in Bradley's financial fraud, she took their two children and moved back to her home state of Oregon. Without her income and without my weekly $550, Bradley's grand illusion disintegrated instantly.
Because my father had used his remaining retirement funds to cover two months of mortgage payments for Bradley in a desperate attempt to save face, my parents defaulted on their own mortgage back in Illinois.
The bank foreclosed on their house in suburban Chicago.
One afternoon, while working in my new Denver office, I received an official document from the state fraud investigator. My parents had agreed to a civil settlement to avoid criminal charges for bank fraud. They were required to pay back the $14,000 credit card debt over five years and surrender any remaining claims to the joint accounts.
Later that week, Mark sent me a photo.
It was a picture of my parents' old house. A large yellow "FORECLOSURE AUCTION" sign stood in the front yard where the Porsche had once been parked.
Mark told me that my parents had moved into a small, rented one-bedroom basement apartment on the outskirts of town. Dad had been forced to take a job as a night-shift security guard at a commercial warehouse to pay for their living expenses—the very job he had lied about losing three years prior.
Bradley had moved in with them. Unable to find a executive job without real qualifications or references, he was working part-time delivering packages, sleeping on a fold-out sofa in their cramped living room.
They were finally living the life they had pretended to live—except this time, there was no secret sponsor working fifty-hour weeks to rescue them.
Clara came into my home office as I looked at the photo on my screen. She placed a cup of coffee on my desk and put her hand gently on my shoulder.
"Do you feel sad?" she asked softly.
May you like
I looked at the image of the foreclosed house. I remembered the years of guilt, the endless anxiety, the generic groceries, and the tears my five-year-old daughter had shed while waiting by a window for grandparents who chose a steakhouse in Phoenix over her birthday.
"I don't feel sad," I said truthfully, closing the laptop screen. "I feel free."
