Greg's Arrest
Chapter 08 - Greg's Arrest
Greg Ashworth's formal arrest, coordinated between Richard's legal team and Detective Rosa Delgado, unfolded two days later, officers arriving at Greg's home with warrants covering both the embezzlement charges and the decade-old conspiracy charges connected to his paid role in fabricating evidence against Sarah.
Tyler, home from school, watched his father being led toward a waiting vehicle with the specific, devastated disbelief of a boy whose entire understanding of his own family had been upended twice in a single week.
"This isn't what it looks like," Greg told his son, through the car window. "I'll explain everything."
Tyler didn't answer. He simply stood in the doorway of a house his father's stolen money had apparently helped furnish, feeling the specific, bottomless shame of understanding every comfortable detail of his own life had been built on someone else's theft.
His mother, Katherine, had already been contacted by the legal team and was sitting at the kitchen table, pale and shaking, trying to absorb the scope of what her husband had apparently been hiding from her for over a decade.
"I didn't know," she told Tyler, tears falling freely. "About any of it. The payments from Constance, the inventory theft, none of it. I believed him the same way you did."
Tyler sat across from her, numb, understanding that the specific, confident identity he'd built at school, the son of an empire, the boy who could tell others where they did and didn't belong, had been constructed entirely on borrowed, stolen ground.
He thought of Mark, standing quietly at that display case in a plain white t-shirt, entirely without pretense, and felt a specific, sharp understanding of exactly how thoroughly their actual positions had always been reversed, had Tyler ever bothered to look clearly enough to notice.
Greg's formal charges, once fully compiled, included embezzlement, fraud, and conspiracy charges connected to his decade-old participation in Constance's scheme against Sarah, the combined weight of evidence leaving little room for the kind of confident denial he'd once been so practiced at delivering.
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"I expect this to resolve through a plea agreement," Detective Delgado told Richard, during a case briefing. "Given the strength of the financial records and the direct paper trail connecting him to your mother's payments, his attorney will likely recommend cooperation rather than a full trial."
Richard nodded, feeling a specific, exhausting relief at the prospect of formal accountability finally arriving for a man who had spent a decade quietly profiting from the destruction of his own family.
