The day the countersuit was filed, I got a call from my mom before the sun went down.
She was hysterical.
“Adam, what are you doing? You’re going to destroy your brother. You’re going to destroy this family.”
I kept my voice calm.
I practiced this with Ren, my therapist, and I was ready.
“Mom, Sutton sued me. He filed a lawsuit claiming I owed him $200,000. I didn’t start this, but I’m going to finish it.”
“But he’s your brother,” she said, like that was a legal defense.
“And I’m your son,” I said. “But that didn’t stop you from taking out a loan against your house to help him come after me. So I think we’re past the point where family titles mean much, don’t you?”
She didn’t have an answer for that.
She just cried and hung up.
I felt something twist in my gut, but I didn’t call her back.
There’s a difference between guilt and grief.
And what I was feeling was grief.
Grief for the family I wished I’d had.
Grief for the version of my mom who would have told Sutton he was wrong and to knock it off.
That version didn’t exist and I needed to stop mourning her.
Over the next few weeks, things started moving fast.
Cordelia had requested a deposition of Sutton and the date was set.
She spent two evenings prepping me on what to expect, but she also told me something interesting.
She’d spoken with Grady Tate informally, lawyer to lawyer, and she said he sounded tired.
Not tired like he’d been working hard, but tired like a man who’d realized he was pushing a boulder uphill, and the boulder was made of nothing.
“I think Grady knows this case is a loser,” Cordelia told me. “He took it thinking you’d settle quick. We didn’t settle. Now he’s months in. He’s done a bunch of work on contingency, and the discovery has produced nothing that helps his client. He’s going to start looking for an exit.”
That was good news, but I wasn’t counting on Grady folding.
Sutton had a way of convincing people to keep going long past the point of reason.
He’d done it with our parents.
He’d done it with every failed business.
He’d convinced Grady to push forward if he could.
What Sutton didn’t know was that I had an ace in my pocket.
Emmett, my colleague and close friend, had introduced me to his brother-in-law, a forensic accountant named Sullivan Price.
Sullivan was the kind of guy who found joy in spreadsheets the way some people find joy in sunsets.
He was meticulous, detail obsessed, and slightly terrifying in the best possible way.
I hired Sullivan to do a full financial analysis of Sutton’s car flipping businesses.
All three of them.
Sullivan came back 2 weeks later with a report that was 40 pages long and utterly damning.
Here’s what he found.
In the first car flipping venture, Sutton had purchased three vehicles using the money I’d given him.
He sold one at a loss, scrapped one, and the third was still sitting in a storage lot, accumulating fees.
Total loss to me: about $8,000.
In the second venture, the one at the center of the lawsuit, Sutton had purchased five vehicles.
He’d fixed and sold two at a modest profit, about $3,000 total.
But he’d spent most of the 12,000 I gave him not on cars but on personal expenses.
New television, a vacation to Myrtle Beach with his then girlfriend Teter, and I’m not making this up, a home brewing kit that he used exactly once.
The other three cars sat untouched and were eventually repossessed by the lot owner for unpaid storage.
The third venture, the one I’d refused to fund, never got off the ground.
Sutton had no inventory, no capital, and no business plan.
Sullivan concluded that even if I had given Sutton the 15,000 he’d asked for, there was no viable business model that would have generated the 200,000 in revenue Sutton was claiming as damages.
In Sullivan’s words, “The projected income figures in the plaintiff’s claim bear no relationship to any reasonable financial reality.”
I read that line out loud to Jolene.
She laughed so hard she woke up Hank.
Cordelia added Sullivan’s report to our evidence package.
The case was airtight.
Sutton had no partnership agreement, no documentation, no credible financial projections, and a clear record of misusing the funds I’d given him.
On top of that, my countersuit was backed by every receipt, every bank statement, and every text message that proved my generosity and his ingratitude.
But here’s where things took one more turn.
About a week before Sutton’s deposition, I got a call from Waverly in Colorado.