Chapter 6: The Broken Line in Seattle
While Lucas built a new life in the mountains, the reckoning in Seattle was swift and unsparing.
Megan did not return to the apartment they had shared.
She hired a commercial moving crew, packed her personal belongings, and moved into a small garden studio in Ballard. With the sixty thousand dollars remaining in her personal savings account, she launched her own independent architectural interior consultancy: *Megan Vance Design Studios.*
She severed all communication with Kyle. When he called her sixty times from different numbers, she registered an automated protective spam block through her carrier.
Kyle was left alone in Seattle with twenty-eight hundred dollars in unpaid moving truck fees, three months of back rent owed to his landlord, and four maxed-out credit cards.
His parents in Sacramento, having received frantic, manipulative calls from their younger son claiming that Lucas had ""assaulted him and thrown him onto the street,"" attempted to wire him five thousand dollars from their dwindling retirement fund.
However, when Thomas Vance called Lucas’s old office in Portland to demand an explanation, the managing partner informed him:
*""Lucas resigned six months ago, Thomas. He surrendered his corporate partnership equity, leased his private residence to disabled military veterans, and moved his practice entirely to non-profit rural conservation. If Kyle is telling you he was promised that house, Kyle is lying to you, as he has for ten years.""*
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Thomas sat at his kitchen table in California, holding the receiver in trembling hands, the thirty-year illusion of his younger son’s innocence finally shattering against the cold wall of public record.
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