Chapter 7 - The Reckoning at Vance Capital
By mid-afternoon, the shockwaves hit the financial district.
Vance Capital was in the middle of closing a two-hundred-million-dollar municipal revitalization fund with the City of Boston. Institutional funds require strict ethical covenants, and moral turpitude clauses are standard across every modern partnership agreement.
When the board of directors learned that Arthur Vance was under active criminal investigation for felony child battery, and when they reviewed the documentation proving that company funds had been funneled through shell consulting accounts to pay off Marianne’s medical bills, panic erupted.
I sat in Evelyn’s office, watching the live business news crawl on the television screen.
*BREAKING: Vance Capital Announces Immediate Administrative Leave for Managing Director Arthur Vance Amid Emerging Legal Investigation.*
My phone buzzed. It was a message from Marianne, Arthur's former fiancée.
*‘Clara, I saw the news. Thank you. For years, I felt like I was crazy, like it was my fault. If you need me to testify, if you need an affidavit about what he did to me, I’m on the next flight to Boston.’*
Tears finally welled in my eyes, not of sorrow, but of profound relief. The isolation was breaking. The silence that my parents had bought with their millions was fracturing into a thousand irrecoverable pieces.
Half an hour later, the door to Evelyn’s reception area was pushed open.
My mother walked in alone.
She had abandoned her usual polished elegance. Her hair was windswept, her designer trench coat was wrinkled, and the haughty disdain that usually defined her expression had dissolved into raw, desperate panic.
May you like
"Clara," she gasped, stepping into Evelyn’s private office. "You have to stop this. You have to call the district attorney. They are executing a search warrant at Arthur’s condominium right now."
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