Chapter 5 - Brendan Was Not Actually a Billionaire Anymore
The public numbers were old.
That was another secret hidden behind polished dining rooms and magazine profiles.
Brendan still owned assets worth enormous amounts on paper.
Hotels.
Development land.
Commercial buildings.
Equity positions.
But ownership value and available money are not the same thing.
Debt sat against almost everything.
When interest costs rose and projects stalled, the empire began consuming cash faster than it produced it.
Brendan responded the way men like him often respond.
He expanded harder.
Refinanced.
Cross-collateralized.
Borrowed short-term money against long-term assets.
The press still called him a billionaire because nobody had recalculated the net value of what remained after liabilities.
Northstar had.
The number was nowhere near a billion.
Diane did not know.
Jessica certainly did not.
Even Brendan resisted accepting it.
He believed one large property sale would fix everything.
Then the sale collapsed.
That triggered a default provision.
The villa was not Brendan’s personal sanctuary in the simple sense his family believed.
It was owned by an entity called Hartman Residential Holdings LLC.
That entity had pledged the property as collateral years earlier.
And three weeks before the lunch, Brendan’s attorneys agreed to a consensual restructuring rather than face a much uglier foreclosure fight.
Part of the agreement transferred control of the villa-owning entity to Northstar after closing.
Closing occurred at 9:00 that morning.
Diane dumped filthy water over me at 12:17.
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She had spent three hours humiliating the legal representative of the company that now controlled the house she was standing in.
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