PART 2
The next morning, Austin and Peyton left the house with Jesse. Joshua waited until their truck turned the corner and knocked on the back door. When I saw him, I collapsed into his arms and sobbed uncontrollably.
“I can’t abandon him, Joshua, because he’s our son,” I repeated through my tears.
Joshua took my injured hands and placed them in front of my face so I could look at them.
“A son doesn’t turn his mother’s love into unpaid labor, and this isn’t help, Gianna, it’s abuse,” Joshua told me firmly.
He took me straight to a hotel in town. He bought clean clothes, ordered food, and called Paula, a lawyer from Detroit who had known about our family properties for years. She didn’t promise any miracles right away. She explained that recovering the house would require a civil trial, evidence, and time, while also recommending that we document the abuse and protect my bank accounts immediately.
At a private medical clinic, doctors documented my eight-kilo weight loss, the severe dermatitis on my hands, my high blood pressure, and my constant anxiety. Mrs. Irene, the next-door neighbor, agreed to testify that she saw me doing heavy laundry in the early hours of the morning and that she had heard Austin insulting me repeatedly. I recovered my email account on a new phone and found the messages Peyton had sent me from the next room.
“The upstairs bathroom is still unfinished, so do not go to sleep until you have ironed everything, and your pension will be used for groceries this week,” Peyton wrote in her text messages.
But the first truth that made me nauseous appeared at the bank. For seven whole months, they had withdrawn almost my entire monthly pension. There were payments for a luxury gym, an expensive clothing store, a fine restaurant, and monthly installments on a new truck. Austin wasn’t just surviving with my help, he was financing his entire comfortable lifestyle with my hard-earned money.
The second truth was even worse than the financial theft.
Paula asked an accountant to thoroughly review Austin’s financial records. She discovered regular large deposits from a construction company where he was still listed as an active external consultant. He had never been completely unemployed as he claimed. He had exaggerated his financial crisis just to force me to stay and allow Peyton to run a catering business from home without paying any external staff.
When Austin noticed that I hadn’t returned to clean his house, he arrived at the hotel furious.
“Mom, you’re destroying the entire family because of a childish tantrum!” he shouted across the lobby.
Joshua stood directly in front of him, blocking his path.
“You destroyed the family when you took away her card and made her sleep next to the noisy laundry room,” Joshua replied calmly.
Austin suddenly changed his tone and adopted a defensive posture.
“This was all just a big misunderstanding, and you know the house is legally mine,” Austin said before pulling out a paper. He then produced a copy of an alleged purchase agreement signed by us, according to which he had paid us for the property years before.
I took one look at the paper and immediately recognized that the signature was not mine.
Paula read the entire document without blinking once. Then she opened the original deed of donation and pointed to a specific legal page that Austin had never understood.
“The house was donated by both of you, and the deed includes an express clause of revocation for ingratitude, in addition to the strict legal obligation not to exercise patrimonial violence against the donors,” Paula explained to us.
“The trial won’t be quick,” the lawyer warned us, “but now we have documented mistreatment, unauthorized withdrawals, and a possibly falsified document.”
Austin turned completely pale as he heard those words.
Before walking out the door, he turned to look at me as if I were the sole person to blame for his troubles.
“If you take this to a judge, I’m going to prove in court that you’re not right in the head,” he threatened.
Two weeks later, when the legal notification of his lawsuit against us arrived, I understood that my son wasn’t planning to apologize at all, but rather he was planning to declare us mentally incapable so he could keep everything we owned.
