Chapter 8 - The Deposition
The formal deposition of Vanessa Cole took place on the fortieth floor of the Chase Tower in downtown Chicago.
Arthur Skelley was not present. After Marcus Vance’s visit to Park Ridge, Skelley had filed a formal motion to withdraw as counsel, citing "irreconcilable professional differences."
Vanessa sat at the far end of the conference table, flanked by an exhausted-looking public defender named Gregory Walsh, whom she had retained through an emergency court appointment after Marcus served her with the civil fraud counter-claim.
Across from them sat Marcus Vance, two court reporters, and me.
Vanessa wore no makeup. Her camel coat was gone, replaced by a cheap, unpressed black blazer from a department store rack. Her dark hair was pulled back with a plain plastic clip. The arrogance, the shimmering North Shore poise that had defined her for twenty years, was missing. In its place was something hollow, hunted, and feral.
In the corner of the room, sitting on a low leather sofa, was Diane Cole.
Mom looked twenty years older. She wore an oversized wool coat that she hadn't taken off despite the warmth of the room. She held a crumpled tissue in her fist, her eyes darting between her two daughters like a woman watching an execution she was powerless to stop.
The court reporter clicked her machine. "This is the deposition of Vanessa Cole in the matter of *Gather and Grain, LLC v. Vanessa Cole*, Case Number 2024-CH-08912. The witness has been sworn."
Marcus Vance adjusted his papers. He didn't look angry; he looked like an accountant preparing to explain a basic math problem to a child.
"State your name and address for the record," Marcus said.
"Vanessa Cole. 1422 North Lincoln Park West, Apartment 4B." Her voice was thin, raspy, lacking its former theatrical melody.
"Ms. Cole, I show you what has been marked as Plaintiff’s Exhibit 1. Can you identify this document?"
Marcus passed a laminated color photograph across the mahogany table.
Vanessa looked down. It was a high-resolution photograph of the severed junction box behind our commissary, with the gold-plated wheat-stalk earring resting in the gravel beside the sliced copper wires.
Vanessa’s hands remained flat on the table. "It's an earring."
"Is it your earring, Ms. Cole?"
Gregory Walsh, her court-appointed lawyer, shifted uncomfortably. "Counsel, if this line of questioning touches upon potential criminal liability regarding the alleged property damage, I must advise my client to invoke her Fifth Amendment privilege."
"She can invoke whatever she likes, Gregory," Marcus said smoothly. "Because Plaintiff’s Exhibit 2 is the security footage from the alleyway of 1840 North Damen Avenue, recorded at one-forty-eight a.m. on Wednesday morning."
Marcus tapped the spacebar on his iPad.
The screen illuminated. The black-and-white night-vision footage was razor-sharp.
A white Lexus pulled into the mouth of the alley. A woman in a dark hooded jacket and light-colored sneakers stepped out. She walked straight to the electrical service junction behind Gather and Grain, carrying a pair of long-handled industrial cable cutters she had bought at a Home Depot on North Avenue two hours earlier—a transaction we had already obtained through a third-party subpoena.
On the video, as she raised the cutters, her hood slipped back.
Her face was illuminated by the security light for five clear seconds.
Mom let out a low, whimpering groan from the corner sofa. She pressed her face into her hands, her shoulders shaking violently.
Vanessa didn't look at the screen. She looked at her fingernails. The shell-pink polish was chipped, bitten down to the quick.
"On the advice of counsel," Vanessa whispered, "I invoke my rights under the Fifth Amendment."
"Very well," Marcus said, without missing a beat. "Let's turn to Plaintiff's Exhibit 3. This is the forensic report on the IP address download logs from October fourteenth at three-fourteen p.m. Ms. Cole, did you download the proprietary financial and operational records of Gather and Grain from a shared Google Workspace?"
"Fifth Amendment."
"Did you forge Maya Cole’s signature on a cocktail napkin purporting to establish a fifty-fifty ownership interest in Gather and Grain?"
"Fifth Amendment."
"Did you send an email to Judith Alvarez at Regional Healthcare Systems containing false statements regarding the regulatory compliance and operational safety of Gather and Grain?"
"Fifth Amendment."
Marcus closed his legal pad with a quiet, final snap.
He leaned forward, folding his hands over the table.
"Ms. Cole, you have invoked your privilege against self-incrimination four times on questions involving criminal property damage, computer fraud, forgery, and tortious interference with contract. In a civil proceeding in the State of Illinois, the trier of fact is permitted to draw an adverse inference from your refusal to testify."
Marcus looked at Gregory Walsh.
"Gregory, you have thirty minutes to confer with your client in the adjacent room. If we do not have an executed, court-certified disclaimer of interest, a full withdrawal of all claims with prejudice, and a signed confession of civil liability by two-fifteen p.m., my next stop is the office of the State's Attorney. We will proceed with the felony indictment for criminal damage to property and corporate sabotage."
Walsh sighed, a long, weary exhalation that signaled he had known this was coming since he took the file.
He stood up and touched Vanessa's shoulder. "Vanessa. Conference room. Now."
Vanessa didn't move for several seconds.
Then, slowly, she raised her head.
Her eyes met mine across the table.
There was no rage left in them. The toxic, glittering fire that had burned in Mom's dining room had been starved of fuel, smothered under the crushing, undeniable weight of documentation, timestamps, and video files. She looked small. She looked like a woman who had spent forty years believing her own myth, only to wake up in a room where nobody cared about the story.
"Maya," she whispered, her voice cracking. "You're really going to send me to prison?"
I looked at her.
My nose didn't throb anymore. The swelling had settled into a faint, permanent ridge along the bone—a small, hard reminder of the price of clarity.
"I didn't send you anywhere, Vanessa," I said, my voice steady, quiet, and completely free of malice. "You walked there yourself. You just expected me to pay the toll."
She stared at me, her lower lip trembling, waiting for the forgiveness that had always arrived to bail her out.
When I didn't speak, she stood up, gathered her cheap blazer around her thin frame, and shuffled through the side door into the conference room behind her lawyer.
Mom rushed across the room toward me, her face wet with tears, her hands reaching out to grab my arm.
"Maya! Sweetheart, please! You've proved your point! She's broken! She has nothing left! You don't have to destroy her life completely!"
I gently, firmly pulled my arm from my mother's grasp.
"She tried to destroy twenty-six lives, Mom," I said, pointing toward the window that looked out over the sprawling roofs of Chicago. "My employees. Their families. My partners. She cut our power lines while we were preparing food for hospital patients. If Elias hadn't caught that failure, people could have gotten sick."
"She was sick with envy!" Mom cried. "That's an illness, Maya! You have to forgive your family!"
"Forgiveness is between her and God," I said, picking up my leather portfolio. "Accountability is between her and the court. And as for you, Mom..."
Diane froze, her breath catching in her throat.
"I'm not angry with you anymore," I said, and the truth of it surprised even me. The bitter, boiling ache that had lived in my chest since Thursday evening had evaporated, replaced by a cool, clean emptiness. "I just see you clearly now. You didn't protect Vanessa because you loved her more. You protected her because you were terrified that if she failed, it would mean you failed as a mother."
Diane flinched as if I had struck her.
"Well," I said, stepping toward the door, "she did fail. And covering it up with cucumber sandwiches didn't change the outcome."
May you like
I walked out of the conference room into the bright, windy afternoon, leaving my mother standing alone on the Persian carpet of someone else’s law firm.
***
