Chapter 3 - The Audit of Entitlement
By noon on Monday, my phone was ringing incessantly.
I was sitting in the back office of my flagship downtown bistro, staring at a spreadsheet of my personal assets, when my phone screen lit up with my father's caller ID. I let it ring through to voicemail. Ten seconds later, my mother called. Missed call. Then Tessa called three times in a row.
Finally, my father called from a different, unlisted number. I answered it.
"Ian! Pick up the damn phone!" my father roared the moment the line connected.
"I picked it up, Dad. Speak quickly. I have lunch service starting in twenty minutes."
"We are sitting here with a lawyer!" he screamed. "He says what you did is technically legal, but it is morally despicable! You are throwing your elderly parents onto the street!"
"You're sixty-one, Dad. You're not elderly, you're lazy," I replied, leaning back in my leather chair. "You haven't worked a real job since I was twenty-seven. You’ve been living off my restaurant profits while telling the family that I’m just 'lucky' in business."
"We raised you!" my mother’s voice shrieked in the background, having put the call on speakerphone. "We gave you life! We fed you! Is this how you repay us? By making your pregnant wife turn you against your own blood?!"
"Do not bring Clare into this," I snapped, my voice dropping an octave into dangerous territory. "Clare tried for three years to be a good daughter-in-law. She baked for your birthdays, she brought you groceries when you claimed you were low on cash, and she tolerated Tessa's insufferable tantrums. But throwing things at her while she's carrying my child? You crossed a line you can never un-cross."
"It was a shoe, Ian!" Tessa yelled from the background. "A soft leather shoe! She didn't even get hit! She's making a huge deal out of nothing because she hates me!"
I chuckled, a cold, dark sound. "Tessa, since you're listening: you have thirty days to find a job, clear out your inventory of un-scented soy candles, and find your own apartment. Because as of 5:00 PM today, I am cutting off the house Wi-Fi, canceling the lawn care contract, and transferring the electric and gas bills out of my LLC's name and into your father's."
"You can't do that!" my father yelled. "They’ll shut the heat off!"
"Then I suggest you pay the electric bill with all that money you saved by not paying rent for sixty months," I said flatly. "Good luck with your lawyer."
I hung up the phone and immediately called my head of accounting, Marcus.
"Marcus," I said.
"Yes, Ian?"
"Audit the family accounts. Five years ago, I gave my parents a credit card under the company umbrella for 'emergency household repairs.' Pull every single statement from the past three years."
"On it," Marcus said.
Twenty minutes later, Marcus walked into my office holding a thick binder of printed bank statements. His face was grim.
"Ian... you’re going to want to sit down for this."
He laid the binder on my desk. I flipped through the pages. Highlighted in yellow were thousands of dollars in personal charges.
$4,500 at a luxury spa in Florida. $1,200 at a high-end designer shoe boutique in Chicago. $800 monthly recurring payments to a "social media growth agency"—which, upon closer inspection, was Tessa’s personal Instagram manager for her failed business.
Over five years, my parents and sister had quietly skimmed over $64,000 off my company credit card, coding the charges as "HVAC repairs" and "structural maintenance."
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They weren't just living in my house for free. They were actively robbing me while treating my wife like trash.
I looked up at Marcus. "Call our legal counsel. I want a formal demand letter sent for full restitution of corporate funds, or we file criminal fraud charges by Friday."
