Chapter 3 - The Eviction from Paradise
I kicked the connecting door wide open with the heavy steel toe of my work boot.
The brass latch splintered against the frame, rebounding with a gunshot crack that echoed over the smooth jazz drifting through the grand reception hallway.
The contrast was enough to make a man lose his mind.
On one side: cracked concrete, moldy walls, sour rice, and my starving family.
On the other side: imported Italian marble, crystal chandeliers casting sparkling gold light, arrangements of fresh white orchids, and dozens of people in black tuxedos and evening gowns sipping vintage champagne.
“Ethan, stop!” Gertrude hissed, running behind us, her pearls bouncing against her sagging chest. “You’ll ruin everything! I invested months into networking with these people!”
I didn’t slow down. I walked straight down the grand corridor, my heavy work boots leaving dusty tracks on the high-gloss floors. Sarah tried to shrink behind me, deeply humiliated by her ripped clothes and bare, dirty feet, but I held her hand with an iron grip.
“Hold your head high, Sarah,” I commanded quietly, loud enough only for her to hear. “You are the lady of this house. Not them. You built this with me.”
We stepped into the grand ballroom.
The room was packed with fifty or sixty wealthy locals, laughing and chatting in small, self-important circles. But as the heavy thud of my boots echoed across the room, the conversations died out one by one. Heads turned. Eyes widened.
They saw a man with broad shoulders, weathered brown skin, and the wild, dangerous eyes of a soldier returning from hell. They saw a skeletal woman wearing rags, trembling like an autumn leaf. And they saw a hollow-cheeked little boy clutching my neck as if his life depended on it.
Prudence burst into the room behind us, panting, her face flushed with desperate panic. “Everyone! Everyone, please excuse this! This is my brother, he just returned from overseas and he’s… he’s suffering from severe exhaustion! Please, head toward the terrace for dessert!”
Nobody moved. The crowd was utterly paralyzed.
I walked straight to the center of the room, near the grand staircase, right next to the brass stand holding the caterer’s microphone. I reached out, picked up the microphone, and tapped it. The feedback screeched through the high ceilings, making the wealthy guests wince.
“Good evening,” I said. The sound was calm, steady, and terrifyingly cold.
“Ethan, give me that!” Gertrude lunged for the microphone, her face twisted in rage.
I didn’t strike her. I simply sidestepped her, and she stumbled, losing her balance on her four-inch heels and crashing clumsily into a display table, sending a tower of champagne flutes shattering into hundreds of glittering shards across the marble.
A chorus of gasps went through the room.
“My name is Ethan Vance,” I spoke into the mic, my voice booming through every corner of the five-million-dollar house. “For the last five years, while you were drinking forty-dollar cocktails in this salon, I was twelve thousand miles away in the deserts of Al-Khobar. I worked twelve-hour shifts on drilling platforms in one-hundred-and-twenty-degree heat. I inhaled concrete dust, I swallowed rust, and I didn’t take a single vacation day.”
Silence. Absolute, breathless silence.
“Every single dollar I earned,” I continued, pointing a calloused finger down at my mother, who was scrambling to get up from the floor, “was wired to that woman. My mother. Under the condition that she provide a comfortable life for my wife, Sarah, and my son, Jamie.”
I lifted Jamie higher so every person in that room could see his protruding collarbones, his pale skin, and the fear in his sunken eyes.
“Ten minutes ago,” I said, every word hitting like a sledgehammer, “I arrived home unannounced. And I found my wife and son locked behind the service pantry in the dirty yard, eating sour, spoiled rice off the floor, while my sister wore a four-thousand-dollar Dior dress paid for with my wire transfers.”
Murmurs of absolute disgust rippled through the room. A woman in the front row put her hand over her mouth, looking at Sarah with genuine horror.
“You have five minutes,” I announced coldly, looking at the entire crowd. “Every single one of you. Drink up your champagne. Put down the caviar. And get the hell out of my house.”
“Ethan, this is madness!” a man in a bespoke gray suit spoke up—it was Councilman Davis, a man Gertrude had bragged about in her letters. “You can’t just treat your mother like this! This is an outrage!”
I turned my glare onto him. “The deed to this property sits entirely in my name, Councilman. Paid in cash from my offshore bank account. If you and your friends are not off my property in four minutes, I will call the sheriff’s department and have every single one of you arrested for criminal trespassing.”
The room erupted into chaos. Nobody wanted to be involved in a public domestic scandal that smelled of child abuse and theft. People began hurriedly setting down their glasses, grabbing their coats, and heading for the double mahogany doors.
Prudence tried to stop them. “Wait! Don't leave! It’s a lie! She’s crazy, he’s crazy!”
Nobody listened. They looked at her with open revulsion and hurried out into the night. Within three minutes, the grand ballroom was empty, save for the spilled champagne, the broken glass, and the four of us.
Gertrude stood up, brushing glass shards from her knees, her eyes burning with pure venom.
“You ungrateful bastard!” she screamed, dropping all pretense of elegance. Her voice became shrill, feral. “I raised you! I gave you life! You think you can humiliate me in front of my peers? In front of the high society I brought into this family? You owe me everything!”
“I don’t owe you the breath in my lungs,” I said quietly.
I looked at Sarah. Her knees were shaking so badly she could barely stand. Jamie was crying softly, overwhelmed by the shouting.
“Ethan,” Sarah whispered, her fingers digging into my arm. “Please… take us away from here. Please. I can’t be in this house.”
“We’re leaving,” I told her gently.
“You step out that door,” Gertrude shrieked, pointing a manicured finger at me, “and don’t you dare think you can come back! I have rights! I’ve lived here for four years! Tenant rights! You can’t touch me!”
I looked my mother dead in the eye.
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“Pack your bags, Gertrude,” I said, stripping her of the title of mother forever. “Because when I come back through that door tomorrow morning, the police will be with me. And everything you stole will be repaid in blood or behind bars.”
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