The crystal flute shattered against the metal spoke of my wheelchair, soaking my lap in three-hundred-dollar French champagne while my fiancée, Brooke, wiped her hands on a linen napkin like she’d just touched garbage.
"Honestly, Ethan, you’re blocking the servers, and the wheel grease on that thing smells like a hospital basement," Brooke said, her voice loud enough to cut right through the string quartet playing in the center of the Vanderbuilt Grand Ballroom.
Around Table 1—the VIP table I had personally sponsored for fifty thousand dollars six months before a drunk semi-truck driver crushed the left side of my Mercedes on I-95—twenty of Manhattan’s wealthiest real estate developers went dead silent. Nobody stood up to help me. Nobody offered me a towel. They just stared into their wagyu beef plates with that sickening, polite upper-east-side pity that hurts worse than a slap in the face.
Then Brooke reached down, clicked the metal brakes off my custom titanium chair with the toe of her Christian Louboutin heel, and shoved me backward.
I rolled ten feet across the polished marble floor until my back wheels slammed hard against a brass service pillar near the kitchen swinging doors. My lower spine flared with a hot, sharp ache, the titanium rods in my pelvis screaming from the jolt, though I kept my face completely blank.
Standing right behind Brooke’s chair was Chad Sterling—my former Vice President of Acquisitions and the guy who used to beg me to co-sign his country club membership. He was draping his arm around Brooke’s bare shoulders, his fingers resting right against the four-carat Harry Winston sapphire necklace I’d bought her for our fourth anniversary.
Worse than that, when Chad raised his glass to toast the table, the chandelier light caught his left wrist. He was wearing my late father’s 1998 Patek Philippe Perpetual Calendar watch. The one that was supposed to be locked inside the biometric safe in the master closet of my Tribeca penthouse.
"Don't make a scene, buddy," Chad called out, flashing a fake, sympathetic smile as he walked over to me, pretending to straighten my crooked bow tie so the crowd would think he was being a gentleman. Once his back blocked the view of the table, his smile vanished. "You shouldn't have come tonight, Ethan. The board at the Silver Oak Foundation already knows Vance Commercial Holdings is drowning in that fourteen-million-dollar tax lien. You’re a bankrupt cripple sitting in a rented tuxedo. Do yourself a favor and take the freight elevator down before security helps you out."
"That watch belongs to my father’s estate, Chad," I said quietly, keeping my voice steady while cold champagne dripped from my knees onto the marble.
Chad chuckled, patting my cheek hard enough to sting. "Actually, according to the durable Power of Attorney Brooke filed while you were in a medically induced coma at Mount Sinai, half the personal property in that penthouse was liquidated to cover your private nursing bills. I bought this off her for five hundred bucks. Crazy how cheap family heirlooms get when your credit score drops into the four-hundreds, right?"
Before I could answer, Brooke strolled over, holding a thick manila envelope bearing the gold seal of the New York County Clerk’s Office, and dropped it straight into my wet lap.
