At the airport parking lot, I found my son sleeping in his car with his twins. I asked where the money went—the three hundred thousand I’d put into his startup. He broke down and told me his wife and her family had taken everything, then told the world he was mentally unstable.
I got furious. “Pack your things,” I said. “We’re fixing this.
Now.”
I found my son asleep in a frozen car at O’Hare International Airport, with my five-year-old grandsons huddled under a thin blanket. When I asked him where the $325,000 I gave him for his business went, he looked at me with dead eyes and said, “Tiffany took it all, Dad.” Then he said, voice cracking, “She’s telling people I’m insane.”
That was the moment I stopped being a retired father and went back to being the man who built half of Chicago. My name is Harrison Caldwell.
I am seventy years old, and I thought I had seen everything. But nothing prepares you for seeing your own flesh and blood broken by the person he promised to love forever. It helps me know I’m not shouting into the void.
It was eleven at night, and the wind at O’Hare cut through my wool coat like a knife. The thermometer on the terminal wall read seventeen degrees Fahrenheit—about minus eight Celsius. I had just landed from a two-week trip to Dubai, where I’d been consulting on a skyscraper project.
I was tired. Jet-lagged. All I wanted was to get my truck and drive home to my warm estate in Lake Forest.
I took the shuttle bus out to Economy Lot G, the cheapest long-term parking available. I usually parked in the garage, but construction on the main terminal had forced everyone out to the remote lots. As I walked down Aisle Fourteen searching for my black Ram 1500 Limited, I saw something that made me stop dead in my tracks.
Tucked away in a dark corner, half hidden behind a concrete pillar, was a silver Ford Explorer. I knew that car. I bought that car.
It was the wedding gift I gave to my son Daniel and his wife Tiffany five years ago. But it shouldn’t have been here. Daniel lived in a four-bedroom house in Naperville.
He had a heated garage. So why was his car sitting in the cheapest lot at the airport, covered in three inches of gray slush? I walked closer, my boots crunching on frozen asphalt.
The windows were fogged up from the inside. Someone had taped pages of the Chicago Tribune over the rear windows to block out the harsh orange light of the parking lot lamps. I wiped a circle of frost off the driver’s side window and peered inside.
The story doesn’t end here –
it continues on the next page.
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