I held the phone up, signaling that I wasn’t finished with the conversation on the other end.
“George, please give me ten minutes to handle this matter here,” I said, hanging up the phone and sliding it back into my pocket with deliberate slowness.
Tyler kept staring at me, his usual smirk entirely replaced by the panicked look of a man who suddenly realized he was trapped in his own web.
“It was definitely a loan,” I said, my voice cutting through his protestations. “And it is a legally binding contract that you signed with your own hand.”
The other guests were pretending to be intensely interested in the patterns on their dinner plates, but nobody dared to move, everyone hanging on every single word.About a year ago, Tyler had shown up at my office in the business district, looking like he was on the verge of a total breakdown.
His real estate firm was hemorrhaging money at an alarming rate.
He had tried to launch a luxury residential development in a neighboring state, and the entire project had collapsed under the weight of lawsuits from subcontractors, nervous investors who wanted their money back, and figures that had been cooked to hide his incompetence.
He had begged me for a bridge loan, swearing on his life that it was only for ninety days.
He promised me he would resolve the issues, claimed that a large bank was on the verge of releasing funds, and acted as though I was his only savior.
That was a complete fabrication.
The banks wouldn’t touch his accounts with a ten foot pole because his financial records were far messier and more dishonest than he had ever admitted to me.
I had that kind of capital for a reason that nobody in my judgmental family ever cared to investigate or understand.
Years ago, when my former husband and I sold the logistics software company we had built from the ground up, everyone simply assumed he was the visionary behind the success.
They had no idea that I had architected the entire operating system, managed the logistics, and structured the business model from scratch.
During the divorce, I fought fiercely for my share, invested my capital into distressed industrial warehouses that no one else wanted, and slowly turned them into a reliable, high yield income stream.
I didn’t brag about my portfolio, I didn’t hold gala dinners to talk about my profit margins, and I certainly didn’t feel the need to prove my worth to anyone.