Chapter 4 - The Deposition
Three weeks later, we gathered in a glass-walled conference room on the 14th floor of a downtown skyscraper for the formal deposition.
Lorraine sat across the table, flanked by two high-priced attorneys in dark suits. She was dressed impeccably in a navy tailored suit, wearing her pearl necklace, projecting the image of a grieving, devoted grandmother who had been cruelly cast aside.
Her lawyer, Mr. Sterling, began the interrogation, targeting Travis. He grilled him on his decision to cut off his mother, trying to frame the red velvet box incident as a pre-meditated, cruel humiliation engineered to extort property from an elderly widow.
"Mr. Vance," Sterling asked smugly, "is it true that you deliberately handed your seven-year-old stepdaughter a box containing property keys to publicly humiliate your mother on Christmas Day?"
"No," Travis replied calmly, leaning toward the microphone. "I gave my daughter a choice. For three years, my mother made Zia feel invisible. She called her 'Travis's girl' and 'the visitor.' She gave her cheap, thrown-away gifts while showering the other grandchildren with iPads and money. I gave Zia the red box so she would know that she had authority over her own dignity."
"And the lake house?" Sterling pressed. "You stripped your mother of her beloved summer home!"
Eleanor Vance interjected smoothly. "We’d like to submit Exhibit C—the late Arthur Vance’s personal journals and estate notes, handed down directly from family archives."
Lorraine’s posture stiffened instantly. Her pale eyes darted to Aunt Karen, who was sitting quietly in the gallery behind us.
Eleanor read aloud from the journal: "‘I leave the Michigan property solely to Travis. Lorraine uses assets as leashes to control the children. I will not allow her to hold this property over Travis’s head as she has done to the rest of the family.’"
Lorraine’s lawyer leaned over to whisper urgently in her ear. Lorraine’s face went white, then flushed a mottled red.
"That's a lie! That's forged!" Lorraine suddenly broke protocol, shouting across the table, slamming her manicured hands down. "He manipulated his father! Just like this woman," she pointed a trembling, accusation finger at me, "manipulated him into abandoning his real bloodline for her stray child!"
"Mrs. Vance, control yourself," the deposition officer warned.
"I will not be quiet!" Lorraine stood up, her composure completely shattered, revealing the raw, ugly obsession beneath her polished exterior. "That child is nothing to this family! She doesn't belong to us! You threw away your mother for a bastard child!"
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The silence that followed was absolute.
Mr. Sterling slowly closed his binder, looking mortified. Eleanor simply smiled, turning to the court reporter. "Please ensure Mrs. Vance’s last statement is transcribed verbatim for the family court judge."
