After four years of saving, I finally bought my dream apartment

On Monday morning, the full scope of my father’s depravity reached an even darker milestone.

I arrived at the downtown Apex Forensic headquarters at 7:30 AM. Marcus Vance was already in the secure fourth-floor conference room with two forensic analysts and Agent Miller from the Internal Revenue Service’s Criminal Investigation Division (IRS-CI).

“Rachel,” Agent Miller greeted me, shaking my hand with professional respect. “Thank you for coming in early. We just intercepted an emergency wire transfer initiated late last night from an IP address matching Arthur Hayes’ residence.”

I sat down at the conference table, opening my encrypted laptop. “Where was he trying to move the capital?”

Marcus projected the transaction path onto the wall-mounted digital display. “At 11:45 PM—roughly four hours after your dinner confrontation at Bistro Bella—Arthur attempted to wire $1.85 million from Ironclad Logistics to a private non-custodial bank in Belize.”

“Did the transaction clear?” I asked.

“No,” Agent Miller smiled thinly. “FinCEN flagged the account thirty seconds after initiation based on our preliminary monitoring warrant. The funds are currently held in a federal suspense escrow account. But that’s not the worst part.”

Agent Miller clicked his remote, bringing up a secondary bank record from a regional credit union that had been closed six years ago.

“While tracing the historical funding sources for Ironclad Logistics,” Agent Miller continued, “we pulled the original capitalization records from 2018. Rachel... take a look at the origin source for the initial eighty-thousand-dollar deposit.”

I leaned in closer to the screen.

The account number on the screen belonged to a custodial trust that had been opened in 1998 by my late maternal grandmother, Clara Jenkins.

My breath hitched in my throat.

When Grandmother Clara passed away when I was ten years old, she had left a fifty-thousand-dollar educational trust fund specifically allocated for my college education. When I turned eighteen and was accepted into the university’s elite economics program, Dad had sat me down at the kitchen table with tears in his eyes, telling me the stock market crash had completely wiped out Grandmother Clara’s trust.

He told me there was zero dollars left.

Because I believed him, I had taken on two campus jobs, worked thirty-five hours a week at a local diner, and applied for multiple private student loans that took me five grueling years to pay off.

The document on the screen proved that Grandmother Clara’s trust had never been wiped out.

In May of 2018, Arthur Hayes had forged my deceased grandmother’s signature, dissolved the educational trust, transferred the entire eighty thousand dollars into his personal account, and used my stolen college fund as the seed money to launch his fraudulent shell company.

He didn't just force me to pay for Emily’s life.

He had stolen my inheritance, forced me into five years of grueling debt, and then used the stolen money to build a multi-million-dollar criminal empire while pretending to be a broke, struggling father.