Chapter 7 - Michelle's True Colors
If Christopher’s professional downfall was spectacular, his personal life was a Greek tragedy.
Stripped of his company, his income, and cut off from the Lawson family trust, Christopher returned to the rented luxury penthouse he shared with Michelle. But the fairy tale had already soured.
A few days after the board meeting, I received a frantic, pathetic voicemail from Michelle. I didn't answer, of course, but I listened to the recording in the quiet of my new office at Vextor.
“Victoria, please, you have to talk to Evelyn. She’s trying to take my babies! I only did it for us—for Christopher! I knew he couldn't have kids, and I knew how much it was destroying him. I gave him the Lawson heirs he needed! You have the company, you won. Just call off the lawyers, please. Christopher is out of his mind, he won't even look at the children...”
I deleted the message. Michelle’s delusions of grandeur had always been her fatal flaw. She truly believed that giving birth to Lawson blood, regardless of how she obtained it, would cement her status. She didn't understand that to people like Evelyn, blood obtained through deceit was tainted.
The reality was far uglier. As I later learned through Vance, Christopher had returned to the penthouse and finally confronted Michelle with the full force of his shattered ego. He couldn't bear to look at the twins. Every time he looked at the baby boy, he didn't see his future; he saw his dead brother, Jonathan. He saw the ultimate proof of his own biological inadequacy—the very thing he had spent years tormenting me over to hide his own shame.
He demanded Michelle leave. Michelle, realizing that Christopher was now unemployed and broke, quickly dropped the act of the loving, devoted partner. She threw his infertility in his face, screaming that he wasn't half the man his brother was, and that she was the only reason he had ever gotten close to the trust fund.
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It was a beautiful, destructive implosion. Michelle tried to flee the state with the twins, but Evelyn’s lawyers were waiting. An emergency injunction froze Michelle’s passports and grounded her. Federal investigators knocked on her door the next morning, armed with a warrant regarding the forged medical documents at the Tucson clinic.
Christopher had wanted a family so desperately he was willing to destroy me to get it. Now, he was trapped in an apartment with a woman who had deceived him, children who weren't his, and a legal battle that would drain whatever small savings he had left.
