Chapter 1: The Cain and Abel Service
The lawsuit arrived on a Tuesday, delivered not by mail, but by a process server who looked apologetic as he handed me the thick envelope on the porch of my small, rented bungalow. I didn’t need to open it to know what it was. I knew the sender.

Richard and Catherine Thorne. My parents. I sat on the porch steps, the envelope heavy in my hands, listening to the cicadas hum in the humid Georgia twilight.

Inside that packet was a declaration of war. They were suing me for “undue influence” and “elder abuse.” They were suing their only son for the title to Highland Creek, a three-hundred-acre stretch of pristine forest and riverfront property that my grandfather, Arthur, had left solely to me. The land was appraised at $6.8 million.

To developers, it was a goldmine waiting to be paved into a luxury golf course. To my parents, it was the lifeline they desperately needed to cover their mounting debts and maintain their facade of high society. To me?

It was the place where Grandpa Arthur taught me how to fish, how to build a fire, and how to be a man—lessons my father had been too busy attending cocktail parties to teach. I ripped open the seal. The legal language was cold, clinical, and vicious.

They claimed I had manipulated a senile old man into cutting his own children out of his will. They claimed I was a predator. I laughed, a dry, humorless sound.

I hadn’t seen my parents in two years. I had spent every weekend of the last five years caring for Arthur while they were “summering” in the Hamptons or “wintering” in Aspen. They hadn’t visited him once in his final six months.

Not once. And now, they wanted the dirt he was buried in. Chapter 2: The Vultures

The deposition took place in a glass-walled conference room in downtown Atlanta.

My lawyer, a sharp-witted woman named Sarah Jenkins, sat beside me. Across the table sat my parents and their attorney, a man named Mr. Sterling who wore a suit that cost more than my car.

My father, Richard, wouldn’t look at me. He studied his manicured fingernails. My mother, Catherine, however, stared right at me.

Her eyes were red-rimmed, a perfect performance of the grieving, betrayed daughter. “Lucas,” my mother said, her voice trembling theatrically. “We don’t want to do this.