The process server found me on a Tuesday afternoon in late October, standing on my front porch with a bag of drywall anchors and a cup of gas station coffee that had gone cold an hour ago. The house behind me was still a work in progress—exposed studs in the guest bedroom, a kitchen backsplash half-tiled, sawdust settled into every crevice like a fine layer of ambition. But it was mine.
Every nail, every crooked baseboard I’d torn out and replaced, every twelve-hour Saturday spent on my knees with a level and a prayer. I bought it eight months earlier at the age of twenty-four, using money I had saved since I was fourteen years old, and I was standing on the porch admiring the new mailbox I’d installed that morning when a man in a polo shirt walked up the driveway like he belonged there. “Jack Thomas?”
I set down the bag.
“Yeah.”
He handed me an envelope with the practiced indifference of someone who had delivered bad news so many times it had become as mundane as passing the salt. The envelope was thick and carried the unmistakable weight of something legal—the kind of weight that makes your stomach drop before your brain catches up. “You’ve been served.”
He turned and walked back down the driveway without another word, and I stood there holding the envelope the way you hold something you suspect might be explosive, carefully, at a slight distance from your body, as if the extra six inches might protect you from what was inside.
I opened it slowly. Karen and Carl King versus Jack Thomas. My parents were suing me.
I read the first page. Then the second. Then I went back to the beginning and read them both again because I was certain—absolutely certain—that I was misunderstanding something.
That the words on the page couldn’t possibly mean what they appeared to mean. Tortious interference with prospective economic advantage. Unjust enrichment.
Fraud. Breach of familial obligation. The translation was simpler than the legal language suggested: my parents were suing me because I had built a successful life while my older brother Nathan had not.
The complaint alleged that I had deliberately manipulated family relationships to gain unfair advantages, that I had concealed critical business advice and mentorship from Nathan causing his ventures to fail, that I had exploited our family name and reputation to grow my business while actively sabotaging his attempts, and that I had received secret financial assistance from extended family members which I had falsely claimed to have earned independently. They were demanding three hundred thousand dollars in damages and the transfer of my house—this house, the one I was standing in front of with drywall dust on my jeans and calluses on my palms—to Nathan, as compensation for what they called “lost opportunities.”
I sat down on the porch steps. The October air was sharp and smelled like wet leaves and wood smoke from a neighbor’s fireplace.
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