Chapter 13 - Seventy-Two Hours
Rebecca treated the insurance form as a serious question, not proof of an intended act.
We contacted the insurer through verified channels and confirmed that no coverage had been placed on me.
The company marked the application as disputed and agreed to preserve it.
I requested that my personal information not be used for any policy without proper verification.
The unsettling part was the date.
Harry had submitted the form before Tiffany ordered me out.
It felt as though my refusal to fetch a beer had merely accelerated a plan already underway.
The next day Harry's attorney contacted Rebecca with a settlement proposal.
Harry would dismiss his civil complaint if I signed an agreement authorizing sale of the house and allowed a portion of the proceeds to satisfy his business debts.
The proposal described this as a family resolution.
Rebecca read it aloud, then set it down.
“No,” I said.
She smiled faintly.
“That's the legal analysis I expected.”
Harry's lawyer attached an artificial deadline of seventy-two hours.
If I refused, he threatened to seek emergency relief preserving the purported investment interests.
Rebecca prepared a detailed response and the evidence supporting my title.
Meanwhile, Tiffany received messages from several people who said Harry had promised them returns on a property deal.
Some were angry.
Others were frightened.
We directed them to the appropriate investigators rather than becoming amateur detectives.
One caller stood out.
His name was Daniel Ortiz, a contractor who had completed renovation estimates for a warehouse that didn't appear to exist.
He said Harry had paid him a small deposit, then used his logo on presentations without permission.
Daniel kept copies of the emails.
He was willing to provide them to investigators.
At the end of the second day, Tiffany found a hidden folder in an old shared cloud account she lawfully accessed.
It contained spreadsheets tracking payments and photographs of several homes.
Mine was not the only one.
There were three more properties, all belonging to older relatives of people who had worked with Harry.
I felt physically sick.
This wasn't simply a young man making reckless decisions with his wife's father.
It looked like a repeated method of finding valuable property through family relationships.
We handed the material to the professionals handling the matter, carefully noting where it came from.
The deadline passed at five on Friday.
I signed nothing.
At five seventeen, Rebecca received confirmation that Harry's attorney had withdrawn from representing him, citing reasons he would not disclose.
At six thirty, Harry appeared at Frank's front gate.
He was holding a folder and smiling as if we were old friends.
“Clark,” he called, “we can settle this like men.”
Frank remained beside me inside the house.
I did not open the gate.
“Contact my lawyer,” I said.
Harry's smile collapsed.
Then he held up a sheet of paper against the fence.
It was a photocopy of Martha's private letter to Tiffany.
He had somehow obtained it.
May you like
And beneath her handwriting, he'd added a sentence I had never seen before.
