Chapter 6 - The Fall of the Conspirators
While Holly slept, the outer world was dismantling Derek Moretti and Vanessa Parker with terrifying, systematic precision.
By evening, local news outlets and financial blogs began picking up the corporate filings. Headlines blared across screens: “Local Real Estate Executive Arrested in Massive Trust Embezzlement Scheme,” followed by subheadings detailing how Derek Moretti had siphoned hundreds of thousands of dollars meant for pediatric cancer research to fund a lavish lifestyle of mistress apartments and failing speculative startups.
Derek’s business partners, realizing they were tied to a sinking ship tainted by federal fraud charges, severed all ties within hours. His corporate credit cards were declined, his luxury BMW was repossessed from the street outside his mistress's penthouse before he could even retrieve his briefcase, and his bank accounts were frozen down to the last penny.
Vanessa, abandoned by Derek the moment his legal defense fund was denied by the courts, found herself locked out of the luxury penthouse with nowhere to go. Her high-society friends, smelling the scandal like sharks in chummed water, stopped returning her phone calls. Forced to rely on the meager savings she had hidden away—which were also quickly depleted by exorbitant legal consultation fees—she was reduced to crashing on the lumpy pull-out sofa of a distant cousin’s cramped apartment in the outer boroughs.
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They had thought they were untouchable. They had laughed in a hospital room, believing that a dying child and a exhausted mother were easy prey.
They learned, too late, that karma has a very sharp memory—and an even sharper legal team.
