Chapter 7 - The Desperation in Brooklyn
Three weeks after the wedding that never was, the rain over New York had turned into a cold, biting November sleet that coated the brownstones of Brooklyn in a slick, dark glaze.
In a fourth-floor walk-up on Court Street in Cobble Hill, Julian Hayes sat at an unvarnished pine kitchen table, staring at an open legal notice that had been delivered by a process server at eight o'clock that morning.
The apartment smelled of stale Chinese takeout, damp laundry, and raw, suffocating panic.
Across from him sat Eleanor, wrapped in a faded wool cardigan, her face pale and lined with deep, bitter creases around her mouth, her turquoise gown from the wedding still hanging in a dry-cleaning bag on the doorframe like a ruined flag.
"The bank sent a final notice on the Mercedes, Julian," Eleanor wept, dabbing her nose with a crumpled paper napkin. "They said if the eighteen-hundred-dollar payment isn't wired by Friday, they will dispatch a repossession team to the driveway! And my sister in New Jersey... she called three times yesterday demanding to know when the second mortgage installment will be credited!"
"Shut up, Mom," Julian rasped, his voice hollow, dead, and stripped of all energy.
"Don't speak to me like that!" she snapped, a pathetic flash of her old arrogance flaring in her eyes. "I am your mother! Everything I did at that reception was for your future! I was trying to ensure that you held the upper hand in that marriage! How was I supposed to know her father was a multi-billionaire who hides behind off-the-rack suits?!"
"You didn't know because you didn't care!" Julian suddenly roared, slamming his fist down onto the pine table so hard his cold coffee cup clattered against the saucer.
He surged to his feet, his eyes bloodshot, wild with the terrifying, cornered rage of an animal that had just realized it had chewed off its own leg.
"She drove a Subaru, Mom! She lived in an apartment with three radiators and a creaking floor! She packed her own lunch! And instead of being grateful that I had found a woman who loved me for who I was, you sat at that table and tried to extort her like a common loan shark!"
"Julian—"
"Do you know what Richard Cole told me when he escorted me out of the building?!" Julian shouted, stepping toward her, his hands shaking violently. "He told me that Elena was the one who wrote the investment memorandum! She was the one who saved the company last year! She gave me my vice presidency, she gave me my stock options, she gave me my bonus... and I threw it all into the gutter because I was terrified of telling you to shut your mouth!"
He collapsed back into his wooden chair, burying his face in his hands, his broad shoulders heaving with ragged, broken sobs that shook the small kitchen.
On the table before him sat his phone.
He had called my old number eighty-seven times over three weeks. Every call went directly to a recorded automated message: The number you have reached has been disconnected or is no longer in service.
He had sent forty-two emails to my personal address. Every message had bounced back with a permanent delivery failure: Recipient address rejected by administrative filter.
He had walked up to the Vance Capital headquarters on Park Avenue twice, only to be met in the brass-trimmed lobby by two armed private security guards who handed him a laminated, court-certified Notice of Permanent Commercial Trespass signed by the Chief of the New York City Police Department.
He was a ghost.
To Elena Vance, to Alexander Vance, and to the entire private equity infrastructure of Manhattan, Julian Hayes had ceased to exist.
His phone buzzed on the wood.
Julian’s head snapped up. His trembling fingers grabbed the glass screen with desperate, frantic hope.
It was not a text from Elena.
It was an automated notification from the New York State Department of Labor:
CLAIM STATUS: UNDER ADMINISTRATIVE REVIEW. REASON: TERMINATION FOR CAUSE / UNLAWFUL MISREPRESENTATION. BENEFIT DISBURSEMENT SUSPENDED.
Julian let the phone slip from his fingers.
May you like
It hit the pine floorboards with a sharp, hollow clack, the screen spiderwebbing into dozens of fractured lines.
He sat back in his chair, stared at the rain streaking the kitchen window, and for the first time in his thirty-three years of life, realized that there was no elevator coming to take him back to the top.
