“Now then, sign yours and this is over,” Mom instructed.
“You saw your son break my knee,” I reminded her softly.
“He made a mistake because you provoked him,” Mom snapped back. “I won’t lose my son because of your obsession with being right.”
I tore the sheets of paper one by one in front of her eyes.
“I don’t choose strangers,” I declared. “I choose the truth.”
When she left, Agent Hoskins appeared from the hallway where she had been waiting.
“Your case has just been strengthened,” Agent Hoskins told me.
Twenty days later, physiotherapy began, and every attempt to bend my knee was met with a thud and applause in my memory. My therapist, Brenda Rivas, kept pushing me forward.
“Don’t measure progress by pain,” Brenda reminded me. “Measure it by movement.”
While I was learning to lift my foot one centimeter, Austin was trying to erase his footprints. The prosecution found the lug wrench hidden in the ceiling of my mother’s garage with traces of my blood on it, even though Austin had sworn he never touched it.
He then offered Kathleen eight hundred thousand dollars to deny the marriage, and when she refused, he threatened her life. Naomi handed over documents to the Public Prosecutor’s Office, while a business partner testified that he saw Austin shredding files for almost two hours as the cameras recorded everything.
One afternoon, Agent Hoskins called my room.
“The prosecutor wants to see you tomorrow because they found something else on Austin’s computer,” Agent Hoskins announced.
“What thing?” I asked, gripping the receiver tighter.
“A file with your name, photographs of your house, and a list of people he planned to force to testify against you,” she revealed.
I felt the air disappear from my lungs.
“How long had he had it?” I questioned weakly.
“Even before you found the marriage certificate,” Agent Hoskins replied grave.
That fake wedding wasn’t Austin’s only secret, and the next day we would discover just how far he was willing to go to destroy me.
PART 3
The file was called Plan M, and it didn’t even have a password because Austin had been so arrogant that he never imagined anyone would check his computer.
The first folder contained photographs of my building, my office, my car, and the gym I attended, some of which had been taken months before the attack. The second one contained my schedules, bank statements, and screenshots of family conversations that my mother had sent him.
“Monica keeps asking about your business,” one message read.
“I spoke with Dad today about your debts,” another text showed.
“He says Naomi should check the paperwork before getting married,” Mom had written.
Prosecutor Leal paused the screen and turned to me.
“Your mother not only tried to cover up the attack,” Prosecutor Leal explained. “She helped him watch over you for at least seven months.”
The third folder contained drafts of false statements that Austin had already written for Mom, two uncles, a cousin, and a neighbor, portraying me as unstable, jealous, and obsessed with destroying my brother. The worst thing was a detailed spreadsheet where Austin had calculated how much it would cost to discredit me through payments to family members, money for Kathleen, fees for a corrupt doctor, and a transfer to an agency to fabricate photos of me drinking excessively.
I recognized three payments that had already been processed through his accounts.
“This wasn’t just a threat,” I said quietly. “It had already begun.”
Prosecutor Leal nodded and opened another folder on the monitor. Austin had also forged clients’ signatures, taken out loans using other people’s property as collateral, and used advance payments for new projects to cover previous debts.
His wedding to Naomi wasn’t just a ceremony, because he planned to leverage the Millican family’s prestige to secure a larger line of credit and conceal his ongoing embezzlement. I hadn’t ruined his future, I had simply stopped a massive scam.
When we told her, Naomi froze in shock.
“So he didn’t want to marry me,” Naomi realized aloud. “He wanted to marry what my family could save him from.”
Kathleen pressed her lips together tightly.
“He did the same to me,” Kathleen added bitterly. “He used a piece of land I inherited from my grandmother as collateral to open his company and then left me to pay the debt.”
For the first time, we understood that we were parts of the same pattern, as Austin chose people for what he could get from them and turned them into enemies when they stopped being useful.
The investigation escalated as clients discovered forged signatures and a supplier submitted altered invoices. Two former employees even confessed that Austin moved money between projects to conceal shortages as each lie opened the door to another.
My recovery was progressing slowly, but at six weeks, Brenda placed two parallel bars in front of me.
“Today you’re going to stand on your own,” Brenda encouraged me.
I clung to the bars as my leg trembled violently and the scar burned.
“Three, two, one,” she counted down.
I got up and lasted four seconds, then seven, before taking a short step and bursting into tears.
“That wasn’t because of pain,” Brenda noted gently.
“No, it was because I’m still here,” I replied through my tears.
That night I wrote in my journal that he broke my knee, but he didn’t get to decide what I would do with the rest of my life.
Two months later I returned to work, where my colleagues had moved my desk closer to the elevator and placed the files on low shelves without making a fuss.
The criminal proceedings began shortly afterward. The first time I saw Austin at the courthouse, he was wearing a transport uniform with his hands cuffed, looking at my cane with disdain.
“Are you still exploiting that injury?” Austin sneered as he passed.
“I don’t exploit it, I live with it,” I answered firmly.
His smile disappeared instantly.
I attended every hearing with Naomi and Kathleen, while my father, George Wellman, didn’t show up at first. All my life I had kept quiet while Dad went out to the patio whenever Austin lied, or Mom turned on the television when she blamed me.
One morning I found my father sitting outside my living room.
“I came to stop lying,” George stated quietly.
He admitted that he had seen Austin enter the garage with the lug wrench before dinner, and that Amanda had told him it was time to teach Monica a lesson. Instead of stopping them, he had taken the car keys and left the house.
“I told myself they just wanted to scare you,” George confessed shamefully. “But I left because I was afraid to face your mother.”
“You left me alone,” I said, letting the words settle between us.
“Yes, and I’m not asking for forgiveness,” he replied. “I just want to make a statement.”
His testimony confirmed that the attack had been planned and that Mom organized the cover-up before I even woke up in the hospital.
During the trial, the prosecutor presented the cross wrench, the x-rays, and the medical reports. Dr. Samuel Wilcoxson explained to the jury that I would probably live with chronic pain forever.
“Will the patient ever be the same again?” Prosecutor Leal asked the doctor.
“She will be able to walk and work, but I don’t expect the joint to return to its pre-injury state,” Dr. Wilcoxson testified.
