Chapter 5 - Gaslight and Gossip
By the time I got home, my phone was blowing up.
My mother had gone to Facebook, playing the ultimate victim. She posted a long, tear-stained video claiming that I had suffered a "mental break" from the heat in Saudi Arabia. She told our entire extended family that I had come home violent, deranged, and had thrown my helpless mother and sister onto the street in the dead of night.
Aunties, uncles, and cousins were blowing up my phone, calling me a monster, a disgrace to the family.
I didn't reply to a single text. I didn't argue in the comments.
Instead, I went to the home security system. I had installed it years ago before I left, mainly for their safety. My mother, in her arrogance, had forgotten it recorded audio and video in the main living areas and the back patio.
I spent four hours pulling clips.
Clips of Valerie screaming at Lira, calling her a "mail-order maid." Clips of my mother eating a lavish steak dinner while locking the door to the back kitchen. Clips of Leo crying for his dad, and my mother telling him, "Your dad doesn't care about you, that's why he left."
I didn't post them online. I didn't need the public drama.
May you like
I put them on a flash drive, drove to the most ruthless, expensive family and fraud attorney I could find in Houston, and slammed the drive on his desk alongside the bank statements.
"I want them destroyed," I told him. "Legally, financially, and completely."
