“Done to you? That’s an interesting way to frame it.”
“Don’t play games,” my father snapped. “You cut us off. You’re trying to make us homeless.”
“No,” I said, my eyes locking on Chloe. “She did.”
I swiveled my chair to face my monitor, clicked my mouse twice, and turned the screen to face them. On it was a scanned image of the second mortgage application.
“Recognize this, Chloe? Your forgery is sloppy, by the way. You looped the G in Dad’s signature. He never does that.”
Chloe’s face went white. My mother gasped, her hand flying to her mouth. My father stared, his blustering anger deflating into stunned silence.
I clicked again, bringing up a color-coded spreadsheet.
“And this is the money trail. $150,000 traced from the loan through your shell corporation and into accounts that paid for a trip to Bali, a down payment on a luxury car, and several maxed-out credit cards from high-end department stores.”
I paused, letting the numbers sit in the air.
“It’s a clear case of wire fraud, not to mention bank fraud and forgery.”
I swiveled the monitor back to me and picked up a single manila folder from my desk. I held it up.
“This folder contains printouts of all the relevant documents, including the emails where you both,” I said, looking at my parents, “agreed to willfully ignore Chloe’s activities. That’s called complicity.”
The power in the room had not just shifted. It had inverted.