Chapter 9 - The Flying Monkeys Arrive
The storm began precisely at 7:15 AM on Monday morning.
Thomas was in the kitchen flipping pancakes for the kids before school when his iPhone began buzzing violently on the marble island.
The caller ID flashed: **Evelyn (Sister)**.
Evelyn was Thomas’s older sister, the golden child of the family. She lived in a luxury townhouse in Boulder, worked twenty hours a week as an interior design consultant, and had her lifestyle heavily subsidized by her wealthy husband—and, indirectly, by Thomas, who had frequently bailed her out of credit card debt whenever their parents begged him to "help your sister."
Thomas swiped to accept and turned on the speakerphone.
"Are you insane?!" Evelyn’s voice shrieked through the speaker, so loud that Samuel looked up from his cereal in shock. "What did you do to Mom and Dad yesterday?!"
Thomas flipped a golden pancake onto a plate. "Good morning, Evelyn. The kids are eating breakfast, so lower your voice."
"Don't you dare patronize me!" she raged. "Mom spent the entire night in the emergency room with chest pains! The venue called the police on them, Thomas! Dad had to sign a promissory note under threat of arrest! They were humiliated in front of the entire family!"
"Did Mom have a heart attack, or did the ER doctor tell her it was acid reflux from eating too much prime rib?" Thomas asked calmly.
There was a split second of silence on the other end. "That’s—that’s completely irrelevant! You abandoned them! You humiliated them over a couple of harmless chores! Mom was crying so hard she could barely breathe!"
"Harmless chores?" Thomas’s tone turned frigid. "Robert and Helen took Samuel’s inhaler, stole two thousand dollars of waitstaff tips, made Jacob drag greasy trays through a dining room, and had Rebecca scrub the floor around Richard’s feet while telling them they were bastards who deserved to be broken."
"They were just exaggerating!" Evelyn yelled back dismissively. "You know how dramatic your kids are! Mom was just trying to instill some structure! You've always been oversensitive about your broken family situation!"
Thomas felt a calm, cold clarity settle over him. "I see. So you agree with how they were treated?"
"I agree that you don't ruin our mother's seventieth birthday over petty nonsense! You need to transfer five thousand five hundred dollars to Dad's account right now to settle the venue bill, and you need to bring the kids over to apologize to Mom before she has a stroke!"
Thomas smiled faintly. "Evelyn, did you know that I stopped paying their mortgage last night?"
Dead silence on the line.
"What?" Evelyn whispered, her voice suddenly losing all its aggressive bravado.
"I canceled the auto-pay on the mortgage, the property taxes, the car leases, the utilities, the insurance, and their grocery deliveries. All of it."
"You... you can't do that! They'll lose the house! Dad's pension is only nine hundred dollars a month!"
"Then you better start paying it, Evelyn," Thomas said smoothly. "You're the golden child. You've got that lovely boutique consulting business. Why don't you cover their eight thousand dollars in monthly expenses? Starting today, they are entirely your responsibility."
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"Thomas, wait! You can't just—"
Thomas tapped the red end button, blocked Evelyn’s number, and set his phone face down on the counter. He turned to his children with a warm smile. "Who wants more whipped cream on their pancakes?"
