Chapter 28 - A Crack in the Probation
While we laid the trap for Vivian’s investigator, Derek was rapidly unraveling on his own. The mandatory anger management counseling was a condition of his probation, but Derek viewed the sessions as a humiliating insult to his intelligence. He sat in the folding plastic chairs of the community center, surrounded by men he considered vastly beneath his social class, seething with quiet, unchecked rage.
After his Tuesday session, Derek didn't go back to his tiny, rented apartment. He walked into a dimly lit dive bar on the edge of town. Violating the terms of his probation, he ordered three straight shots of cheap whiskey.
As the alcohol burned down his throat, the fragile, compliant mask he had worn for the judge completely dissolved. The liquor fueled his towering narcissism, twisting his financial ruin and public disgrace into a narrative where he was the ultimate, tragic martyr.
He pulled a prepaid burner phone from his jacket pocket. The court order explicitly forbade him from contacting me outside of the monitored co-parenting app, but the whiskey made him feel invincible. He dialed my private cell number—a number he had secretly memorized from a legal document during the divorce proceedings.
I was sitting in my living room, watching the security feeds with Elias, when my phone vibrated on the coffee table. An unknown number flashed on the screen.
Elias looked at the phone, then at me. "Answer it on speaker," he instructed quietly, tapping a button on his tablet to initiate an audio recording protocol.
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I swiped the green icon. "Hello?"
"You took everything from me, you vindictive bitch," Derek’s slurred, venomous voice hissed through the speaker. "You think you won? You think you can just erase me from my own daughter's life?"
