She doesn't need $85,000 for experimental therapy when she is going to pass away by winter anyway.
Ward wasn’t one to accept defeat quietly. He was denied access to me, his firm was frozen, and his conservatorship was under fire. But he still held one devastating card.
The next afternoon, Gideon arrived, his face grim. He didn’t even bother with small talk.
“He hit me,” Gideon said, his voice flat. “Julian Ward just slapped a foreclosure lien on the garage.”
My breath caught in my throat. Gideon’s auto repair shop was everything to him. It was our family’s last steady income.
“A hundred and ten thousand dollars,” Gideon continued, his hands clenched. “He’s calling in a cross-collateral note Nora signed months ago.”
A cross-collateral note. I remembered Nora talking vaguely about “expanding our investment portfolio” with Ward, something about leveraging “underutilized assets.” It sounded so abstract then.
Now, it was concrete. It was Gideon’s livelihood, threatened with immediate ruin.
“Nora signed a personal guarantee,” Finch explained, looking up from his phone, which he’d been using to confirm the details. “It connected a small, forgotten land parcel she technically owned to a loan Ward extended for his ‘investment’ scheme. And that loan was indirectly linked to your father’s business assets.”
He shook his head. “It’s a predatory setup, designed to give him leverage over anyone in the family.”
Gideon stared out the window, his shoulders hunched. “He wants me to back off. To force you to drop the legal challenge, Hannah.”
My heart sank. He was facing financial devastation because of my fight.
“Don’t,” I told him, my voice firm. “Don’t let him do it.”
Gideon looked at me, a glimmer of his old stubbornness in his eyes. “He thinks he can break us. He thinks he can use money to scare us into submission.”
He pounded a fist lightly on the bedside table. “He’s wrong.”
“We will fight this, too,” Finch assured him, though his expression remained serious. “It’s another layer of his fraudulent scheme.”
Meanwhile, Evelyn Pryor had not been idle. That morning, the *Upstate Courier* hit the newsstands, its front page emblazoned with a bold headline: “The Shadow Contract: Local Speculator Julian Ward’s History of Targeting the Vulnerable.”
The article, Evelyn’s expose, laid bare Ward’s predatory history across three upstate counties, detailing how he systematically targeted sick landholders and financially desperate families, leveraging obscure clauses and complex contracts.
Her phone rang constantly. The newspaper was flying off the shelves. The public was finally seeing Julian Ward for what he truly was.
His attempt to ruin Gideon had only ignited a fiercer fire.
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