Mój ojciec kazał mi się „wynieść”, bo nie mogłem zapłacić 12 000 dolarów — nie wiedział, że już kupiłem dom na plaży na Florydzie.

Lien – Seawall Capital – amount $200,000 – status: discharged.

That was old.

Then I saw it.

A filing from thirty months ago.

Instrument type: secondary deed of trust.

Lender: Apex Private Lending Group.

Principal amount: $450,000.

Signatories: Dale Whitaker, Cynthia Whitaker.

I froze.

A second mortgage.

For nearly half a million dollars.

I pulled the details of the note.

It wasn’t a standard bank loan. It was a hard‑money loan, the kind of thing house flippers and desperate speculators use when the banks say no.

Interest rate: twelve percent. Adjustable.

Balloon payment due thirty‑six months from signing.

I did the math.

Thirty months had passed.

That meant the balloon payment—the entire principal plus accrued interest—was due in six months. If they didn’t pay it, they’d lose the house.

But that wasn’t the worst part.

I looked at the disbursement schedule.

The money hadn’t gone into the house. There were no permits pulled for renovations that year. The money had gone into a checking account.

And from there, it had vanished.

Then I saw the rider attached to the bottom of the PDF.

Additional collateral – guarantor pledge.

I zoomed in on the signature page of the rider.

There was my name: Melody Alvarez.

And there was a signature that looked nothing like mine—a shaky, looped scrawl that tried to mimic my handwriting but failed miserably.

I sat back in the hotel chair, the air‑conditioning humming around me.

They had borrowed half a million dollars from a predatory lender at loan‑shark rates and pledged my future assets as collateral. If they defaulted—which they inevitably would—in six months, Apex Private Lending wouldn’t just take the house.

They would come after me.

They would garnish my wages. Seize my accounts.

They had not just stolen from my present.

They had sold my future to buy themselves two more years of country club dinners and designer dresses.

I looked at the date on the document—thirty months ago.

That was around the time Dale bought the new boat—the boat he said he “won in a raffle.”

A cold smile touched my lips.

It wasn’t a happy smile. It was the smile of a surgeon who had finally located the tumor.

“Apex Private Lending Group,” I whispered to the empty room.

I opened a new browser tab.

I wasn’t going to report this to the police.

Not yet.

That was too slow.

I was going to find out who owned that note.

And then I was going to become them.

The party was still going on across town. Sloan was probably cutting the cake. Dale was probably toasting to the “family’s enduring legacy.”

Let them toast.

They were drinking on the deck of the Titanic.

And I had just found the blueprints to the iceberg.

The coffee in the hotel room pot was burnt and tasted like chemical sludge, but I drank it anyway.

It was three in the morning. Nashville slept. The forensic accountant in my brain did not.

The two worlds of the Whitaker family were colliding—the glossy lie they projected to the world, and the rotting financial skeleton they hid in the closet.

I had the loan document from Apex Private Lending open in one window. In another window I had Sloan’s Instagram archive, which I’d quietly scraped using a marketing tool I originally built for Root Warden.

I needed to trace the money.

According to the loan documents, the $450,000 was disbursed on August 12, two years ago. The stated purpose on the application: foundation repair and structural renovation.

I looked at the house maintenance logs I’d kept during that period. There had been no contractors. No cement trucks. No structural engineers. The only thing repaired that month was a leaky faucet in the guest bathroom, which I’d fixed myself with a three‑dollar washer from Home Depot.

So where did nearly half a million dollars go?

I toggled to the Instagram window and scrolled back to August of that year.

August 10 – a post about “manifesting abundance.”

August 11 – a photo of packed Louis Vuitton suitcases.

August 12 – a video.

I clicked play.

The video showed Sloan and my parents standing in the lobby of a private villa in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico. The Pacific glittered through floor‑to‑ceiling glass. Uniformed staff handed them chilled towels.

The caption read: So incredibly blessed. Mom and Dad won the grand prize in the LuxLife sweepstakes—two weeks in paradise. Sometimes the universe just PROVIDES. #blessed #familyvacation #WhitakerLegacy

I paused the video on my father’s face.

He was grinning, holding a glass of champagne. He looked like a man who had just pulled off the heist of the century.

I cross‑referenced the disbursement date. The wire transfer from Apex hit their account at 9:00 a.m. on August 12.

They checked into the villa at 4:00 p.m. the same day.

There was no sweepstakes.

There was no prize.

They had taken a high‑interest, predatory loan against the house, forged my signature as guarantor, and blown a chunk of it on a vacation to impress people on the internet.

A cold burn spread in my stomach.

That week, I had been at home in Cedar Ridge, eating leftovers and taking care of the dog they left behind. Feeling happy for them that they “finally had some good luck.” I had even driven them to the airport.

I went back to the Apex portal. I had managed to access the payment history by using the account number from the document and answering the security questions.

It was pathetic how easy it was.

Mother’s maiden name. First pet’s name.

They’d used the answers I had taught them to remember years ago when setting up their email.

I looked at the payment status.

The row for the current month was red.

So was the month before.

And the month before that.

Status: DEFAULT – IMMINENT.

Days past due: 120.

They hadn’t made a payment in four months. At twelve percent interest, the penalties were compounding daily.

They weren’t just in debt. They were drowning.

Apex had already sent the notice of intent to accelerate. The legal precursor to foreclosure.

The house wasn’t really theirs anymore.

It was a carcass waiting for vultures.

But there was still the issue of my signature.

How had they bypassed verification? A loan of that size required identity confirmation.

I opened a new tab and logged into my old Yahoo email account, the one I’d used in high school and college. I rarely checked it anymore—everything important lived on my secure business servers now—but my parents knew this password. I had written it in the “emergency passwords” notebook in the kitchen drawer in case “something ever happened” to me.

I went to the trash folder.

Nothing.

Spam folder.

Nothing.

Then I clicked “Recover deleted items”—the digital graveyard for things people think are gone forever.

I scrolled back to August two years ago.

There it was.

Subject: ACTION REQUIRED – VERIFY YOUR GUARANTOR SIGNATURE.

From: Apex Private Lending.

It had been opened. The verification link clicked. Then the email had been hard‑deleted.

I checked the IP address of the user who performed the deletion.

It matched the IP address of the Whitaker home router.

I sat back, neon light from the laptop screen reflecting in my eyes.

It wasn’t just desperate borrowing. It was calculated fraud.

One of them—probably Dale, with Sloan’s tech help—had logged into my email, impersonated me, digitally signed the guarantee, and then scrubbed the evidence.

They had looked me in the eye for two years, knowing they had committed a felony using my identity, and never blinked.

I reached for my phone.

It was 4:15 a.m.

I dialed Ethan Cole.

Ethan was not a family lawyer. Ethan was a shark in a three‑piece suit who specialized in corporate takeovers and intellectual property disputes. He had handled the Root Warden sale. He cost eight hundred dollars an hour, and he was worth every cent.

He answered on the second ring, his voice raspy with sleep but instantly alert.

“Melody. It’s four in the morning. Are you in jail, or is the server farm on fire?”

“Neither,” I said. “I need to make a purchase.”

“Can it wait until sunrise?”

“No,” I said. “I need to buy a debt instrument. A distressed asset. It’s a secondary mortgage note held by a company called Apex Private Lending Group.”

I heard the rustle of sheets and the click of a bedside lamp.

“Okay,” he said. “Who’s the borrower?”

“Dale and Cynthia Whitaker.”

There was a long silence.

Ethan knew about my family. He had seen the way I structured my dividends to hide them. He had been telling me to cut them off for years.

“Melody,” Ethan said, his tone shifting from lawyer to friend. “If you pay off their mortgage, they’re just going to do it again. You can’t bail them out of a hole this deep. You’re enabling them.”

“I’m not paying it off, Ethan,” I said, my voice ice‑cold. “I’m buying the note. I want to become the lender.”

Another silence. Heavier.

“Explain.”

“They’re four months behind. Apex is about to foreclose. If Apex forecloses, the house goes to auction. The asset is lost. My parents play the victim card to the whole town. They’ll say the banks crushed them. They’ll get sympathy.”

I stood and walked to the window, looking out at the sleeping city.

“But if I buy the note,” I continued, “I own the debt. I control the timeline. I control the terms. I become the bank.”

“You want to foreclose on your own parents?” Ethan said. It wasn’t really a question.

“I want to hold the leash,” I corrected.

“They forged my signature to get this loan, Ethan. They used my name to secure four hundred fifty thousand dollars and blew it on vacations and gambling. They’re counting on the fact that the bank is a faceless algorithm they can stall with lawyers.”

I pressed my hand against the cold glass.

“I’m not a faceless algorithm. I know where the bodies are buried because I dug the holes.”

Ethan sighed—the sound of a man realizing he was about to get paid a lot of money to do something very aggressive.

“Okay. If we do this, we do it smart. We can’t buy it in your name. If they see ‘Melody Alvarez’ on the transfer notice, they’ll think it’s a gift. They’ll think they can manipulate you.”

“Exactly,” I said. “We need a shell. An LLC.”