Chapter 10 - The Golden Child in Cuffs
At 7:00 PM, Ryan was released from the airport holding cell on his own recognizance for the child endangerment charge—only to be met at the front doors of the Franklin County Sheriff’s Office by two detectives from the Financial Crimes Unit.
Nathan had worked fast. A former colleague of his in the prosecutor's office had pushed the warrant through an on-call emergency magistrate after viewing the digital scans of the forged notarization on my parents' home equity loan.
I was sitting in the unmarked conference room down the hall when they brought Ryan in.
He wasn't wearing his tailored coat anymore; it had been taken during processing. He was in his wrinkled dress shirt, his hair disheveled, his hands cuffed in front of him.
When he saw me sitting next to Nathan, his face contorted into something wild and feral.
"You bitch!" Ryan lunged toward the table, but the detective behind him clamped a heavy hand down on his shoulder, shoving him down into a metal folding chair. "You called the cops on me at the airport, and now you’re doing this?! Mom told me you were jealous of Brooke, but I never thought you were this pathetic!"
"Ryan," Nathan said, his voice dropping into the quiet, terrifying cadence of a seasoned courtroom predator. "Shut your mouth. Every word you say is being recorded on the overhead array, and right now you are looking at eight counts of felony identity theft and one count of bank fraud exceeding two hundred thousand dollars."
"She gave me permission!" Ryan yelled, his spit flying across the laminate table. "She told me I could use her credit! We're family! Ask Mom! Mom has the paperwork!"
"Your mother didn't have the legal authority to sign Claire's name on a home equity line of credit, Ryan," Detective Kowalski said, dropping a thick folder onto the table with a loud *thud*. "The notary whose stamp appears on this November fourteenth loan document already rolled on you. She works at your title company, doesn't she? She admitted twenty minutes ago that Claire Vance was never in the room."
Ryan froze.
The color drained from his face so fast it looked like someone had pulled a drain plug in his chest. His eyes darted from the detective to Nathan, and finally to me.
For the first time in thirty-four years, Ryan looked at me and didn't see an obedient, frightened sister who would absorb his messes.
He saw his executioner.
"Claire," he croaked, his voice cracking down the middle. "Claire, listen to me. If I go to prison, Brooke leaves me. The kids lose the house. You can't do this to Ella and Noah. Think of the kids."
"You didn't think of them when you left them on my floor like bags of trash," I said. My voice didn't waver. Not a single millimeter. "You didn't think of them when you stole my credit to buy cruise tickets while your own accounts were drowning in default. You used them as human shields to get what you wanted."
"I was going to pay it back!"
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"With what, Ryan?" I stood up, pushing my chair back with a soft scrape against the linoleum. "You have no money. You have no business. You have nothing except lies, and today, you ran out of people to pay for them."
***
