Chapter 8 - THE AMBUSH ON SOCIAL MEDIA
Before the ink was even dry on the state fraud affidavits, Eleanor played her next card.
I was at my apartment kitchen counter on Friday afternoon when my phone started blowing up with notifications from distant relatives, old college acquaintances, and even former high school teachers. Texts, DMs, and voice messages poured in simultaneously like an uncapped fire hydrant.
*“Alex, how could you?”*
*“Is this true? Have you lost your mind?”*
*“Your poor mother! Call her right now!”*
I unlocked my phone and opened Facebook. At the top of my local community feed was a three-minute video posted by my mother from Mike’s account.
She was sitting on the steps of the Elm Street house—the very steps where she had held court for decades. She wore an old, faded cardigan of my late father’s, her gray hair deliberately unbrushed, tears streaming down her hollowed cheeks. In the background stood Mike, looking dejected, holding up a bright red eviction summons.
"I gave him thirty-four years of my life," Eleanor was sobbing into the camera, her voice trembling with manufactured tragedy. "I worked double shifts at the laundry after his father died to put him through college. And now that he’s making hundreds of thousands in the city, he’s kicking his own widowed mother onto the street. He’s sending private process servers to threaten us. He told me I was dead to him over Easter dinner because I couldn't pay him back for a meal."
The caption was even worse: *SUCCESS HAS DESTROYED MY SON’S SOUL. PLEASE PRAY FOR HIM TO FIND GOD BEFORE HE THROWS HIS FAMILY OUT IN THE COLD.*
The video had already been viewed over forty thousand times. It had hundreds of shares and thousands of furious comments calling me a "corporate parasite," a "sociopath," and a "disgrace to humanity."
People I hadn't spoken to since middle school were commenting, demanding my corporate employer fire me for elder abuse. Someone had even tagged my firm’s official LinkedIn account in the comment section.
My pulse hammered against my temples. The audacity of it was breathtaking. She knew the fraud charges were coming; Arthur’s preliminary legal notice had arrived at Elm Street that morning. This wasn't an act of sorrow—it was a pre-emptive digital smear campaign designed to humiliate me into a corner where I would pay her debts just to make the shame go away.
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Ten minutes later, my firm's managing partner, Marcus Vance, called my direct line.
"Alex," Marcus said, his tone measured but firm. "I’m looking at our public relations dashboard right now. We have seventy-two complaints filed against your professional profile in the last hour. What the hell is going on?"
