Chapter 15 - The Shredded Apology
A year passed, and my life flourished in ways I had never imagined possible.
Without the constant drain of my family's demands, my company expanded globally.
We went public, and my personal net worth skyrocketed into the stratosphere.
I bought a beautiful vacation home in Italy and took actual weekends off.
I started dating a wonderful man who respected my boundaries and my ambition.
He never asked me for money or expected me to fix his problems.
We built a relationship on mutual respect rather than toxic transactional obligations.
One rainy Tuesday, I received a letter in the mail with a prison return address.
It was written on cheap, lined paper in my mother's familiar, looping handwriting.
She wrote about how hard life was on the inside and how much she missed me.
She completely ignored the crimes she had committed and painted herself as a victim of circumstance.
She ended the letter by asking if I could put some money into her commissary account.
Even after everything, her instinct was still to treat me like a bank.
I didn't feel angry, and I didn't feel sad.
I just felt a profound sense of absolute pity for her.
She had learned absolutely nothing from the destruction of her own life.
I took the letter and fed it directly into the paper shredder in my home office.
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I didn't send a reply, and I certainly didn't send a single dime.
The silence was the only answer she would ever get from me again.
