Chapter 6 - Homeless Prestige
Without my money, the Vance family collapsed like a house of cards in a hurricane.
The luxury car company repossessed Julian’s Mercedes. Chloe’s Porsche was seized by the bank to pay off her mounting credit card debts. The bank froze all of Julian’s personal accounts due to the pending criminal charges for embezzlement.
Eleanor, who had spent decades boasting to her high-society friends about her wealthy family and aristocratic roots, was forced to live in a cramped one-bedroom apartment in an unsafe neighborhood on the outskirts of the city.
One rainy afternoon, I had my driver stop near a local diner downtown. I watched through the tinted glass window of my limousine as Eleanor Vance stepped out of a cheap grocery store, carrying two flimsy plastic bags.
She was wearing a faded rain jacket. Her hair, once meticulously styled at five-hundred-dollar salons, was frizzy and unkempt. As she tried to cross the street, a passing bus hit a puddle, splashing dirty rainwater all over her clothes.
She stood on the sidewalk, dripping wet, clutching her cheap groceries, and began to sob hysterically in the middle of the crowded street. Passersby walked past her without a second glance—just as she had treated thousands of people she deemed “below” her.
I closed the leather curtain of my limousine.
“To the office, Charles,” I told my driver.
May you like
“Yes, Ms. Vance.”
She had called me trash. She had told me trash gets treated badly. Now, she was learning what it truly meant to be discarded by the world she had tried so hard to impersonate.
