Evan must have been poking around, trying to figure out how I could afford the lifestyle I had without clocking in.
I gave Jordan a vague but polite answer, and that was that.
Or so I thought.
Friday morning, my accountant emailed me with an alert.
Someone had tried accessing the back end of one of my smaller portfolio sites.
Nothing major, just a branded drop shipping domain I rarely touched anymore.
But the IP matched a device from my old hometown, and that narrowed the suspect list significantly.
I didn’t confront anyone.
Not yet.
I just changed every password, updated my 2FA, locked out my assets tighter than Fort Knox.
But it confirmed what I already suspected.
Evan couldn’t just let it go.
A week later, my mother invited me to brunch.
Just us.
She said she missed me.
I almost didn’t go, but curiosity got the better of me.
When I arrived, she was already seated at the little beastro downtown, stirring her tea like she was waiting for a confession.
“Julian,” she began before I even sat down. “Why do you always have to make everything a competition?”
I laughed softly without humor.
“Mom. Evan called me a leech at his own party. I didn’t start that conversation.”
She sighed.
“You know how he gets when he’s feeling threatened.”
“Threatened by what?” I asked. “By someone who didn’t follow the script and still came out ahead?”
She didn’t answer.
Instead, she changed the subject, asked if I was doing okay financially with that same tilted-head concern she’d used when I was 22 and figuring things out.
I stared at her.
“Mom,” I said, “I make more in a month than Evan makes in a quarter, and I don’t have to beg anyone for PTO.”
Her face froze.
Not in anger, but confusion, like she genuinely didn’t know what to do with that information.
The following Monday, it happened.
I was in the middle of reviewing an investment when I got a flood of notifications, tags, mentions, comments.
My LinkedIn was blowing up.
Evan had written a long, smarmy post about entrepreneurship myths and fake success stories that relied on luck, timing, and family handouts.
He never used my name, but anyone who’d been at that party knew who he was talking about.
It was subtle, but cutting.