Two days passed in absolute silence on my end, though my blocked calls log indicated that Khloe had attempted to ring me over twenty times. On Thursday afternoon, my mother called me from her home landline. Her voice was trembling, thick with panic.
“Lucas… please tell me you know what’s going on,” Mom wept silently into the receiver. “Two men came to the house today. They were from the bank, Lucas. They posted a formal notice on the front door. They said we are six months behind on our payments!”
I gripped the edge of my office desk, my blood running cold. “What did you say, Mom? Six months behind? That’s impossible.”
“That’s what they said!” she sobbed. “They said the last payment they received was back in May! Lucas, your father is going insane. He’s yelling at everyone, his blood pressure is through the roof, and he’s demanding to know where the money went! He thought Khloe was handling the mortgage with her own savings!”
My brain reeled as the math slammed into me like a freight train.
For twelve months, I had wired Khloe $6,000 on the first day of every month. $72,000 in total. If the bank hadn’t received a payment since May, that meant only five or six payments had actually been made to the mortgage company.
Where was the rest of the money? Where was the remaining $36,000 I had painfully squeezed out of my architectural salary?
“Mom,” I said, my voice dropping to a low, stern register. “Listen to me carefully. I am driving down to Rochester right now. Do not let Dad call any lawyers, and do not let Khloe leave that house if she’s there.”
“She is here,” Mom whispered, terrified. “She drove down from Chicago this morning when Dad called her screaming. She’s upstairs in the guest room right now, locking herself in.”
“I’ll be there in two hours,” I said.
I left work early, canceling my late meetings. As my car swallowed the miles down Highway 52 toward Rochester, the anger inside me crystallized into absolute clarity. I wasn’t just dealing with a father who despised me; I was dealing with a sister who had actively stolen from me while smiling in my face.
When I pulled up to my childhood home, the scene looked deceptive from the outside. The autumn leaves were falling over the front lawn, but stuck right beside the wooden front door was a bright yellow, laminated paper: NOTICE OF INTENT TO FORECLOSE.
I pushed the front door open without knocking.
The atmosphere inside was thick with tension. My father was pacing back and forth in the living room, holding a stack of bank letters in his shaking hand. His face was beet red, his neck veins bulging. Mom was sitting on the sofa, clutching a wet tissue, her eyes red and swollen.
When Dad saw me walk through the door, his eyes flared with anger.
“What are you doing here, Lucas?” Dad barked, slamming the bank letters onto the coffee table. “As if this family doesn’t have enough problems today, now I have to deal with you coming in here to watch us fall apart?”
“Quiet down, Michael,” Mom pleaded weakly, but Dad waved her off.
“No, Karen! Look at him! He probably came to gloat!” Dad sneered, turning his anger directly toward me. “Your sister is upstairs crying her eyes out because her company is having financial hiccups, and the bank is threatening to take our home! Where were you when Khloe was carrying this family on her back for the last year? You were hiding out in Minneapolis, saving your little money for yourself!”
I stood near the entryway, looking at my father with profound pity. He still had no idea. Even with a foreclosure notice glued to his door, his instinct was still to protect Khloe and degrade me.
“Dad,” I said softly, stepping into the center of the room. “Who told you Khloe was carrying this family?”
“She told me!” Dad yelled, gesturing wildly toward the ceiling. “She’s been giving us envelopes of cash every month to pay the mortgage out of her own pocket because she’s a successful daughter who cares about her parents! She didn’t want to embarrass me by making a public spectacle of it!”
