“What buyer agreement?” Julian demanded.
“The one attached to the email chain recovered from the courthouse submission portal.”
I closed my eyes.
Julian and Sarah had not improvised this that morning.
They had planned it carefully enough to divide the profit before they owned anything.
The detective continued.
“The agreement states that Sarah Ellison would receive twenty percent of net proceeds after the property was resold.
It also states that you intended to list the house within sixty days of acquisition.”
So much for keeping it in the family.
The beach house had never been meant to become a vacation home for my parents.
That was simply the story Julian told them to get their money.
He planned to sell it, take the profit, pay Sarah, and perhaps return my father’s original investment if it suited him.
My parents had celebrated my supposed collapse because Julian had promised them access to my deck.
He had been planning to sell the deck out from under them too.
Julian grabbed his phone despite the detective’s order.
I heard an officer step forward.
“Put it down, sir.”
“I’m calling my attorney.”
“You may call an attorney after we document the device.”
The family group chat suddenly showed Julian as typing.
Then the messages began disappearing one by one.
His announcement about the foreclosure vanished.
The celebration emojis vanished.
His comment about flipping the property vanished.
Detective Rustova noticed immediately.
“Are you deleting messages related to this transaction?”
“They’re family jokes.”
“We preserved the chat before you touched the phone.”
Julian stopped deleting.
That sentence changed the air in my kitchen.
The screenshots I had taken mattered, but the investigators had apparently obtained their own preserved copy through the bank’s emergency fraud process.
Julian’s smugness, my father’s wire confirmation, my mother’s encouragement, and the private message telling me I could visit my own house if I asked nicely were no longer family drama.
They were a timeline.
A second officer entered the courthouse room carrying a sealed bank envelope.
Detective Rustova read the label.
“This contains the transfer record for the $200,000 wired by Thomas Vance this morning.”
My father.
Until that moment, I had not known whether the money itself could connect him to the fraud or merely prove that Julian had manipulated him.
The detective asked Julian a direct question.
“What did you tell your father the money was for?”
“A property investment.”
“Did you tell him the foreclosure was genuine?”
“I believed it was.”
“Did you tell him Marcus had agreed to the sale?”
Julian hesitated.
That hesitation answered before he did.
“I told him Marcus had no choice,” he finally said.
My father called me while I was still listening to the courthouse line.
I let it ring once, then answered on my second phone so I could hear both conversations.
“Marcus,” Dad said, already angry.
“What are you doing?”
Not what happened.
Not are you safe.
What are you doing?
“I’m standing in my kitchen,” I said.
