Chapter 5 - THE WOMAN THEY LEFT BEFORE ME
Her name was Hannah Cole.
She called Rachel’s office after seeing my face on the news.
Four years earlier, Hannah had been engaged to Brad.
She appeared in dozens of Mercer Road videos, usually as the serious woman Brad enjoyed provoking.
Viewers called her humorless.
Brad encouraged them.
During a road trip through South Dakota, the brothers took her wallet and left her outside a closed roadside attraction after midnight.
They filmed from a distance while she searched for help.
Brad returned two hours later with a camera and an apology.
He offered transportation if she signed a release confirming the abandonment was staged with her consent.
Hannah signed.
She was cold, frightened, and nearly twenty miles from the nearest occupied building.
The edited video showed her laughing at the end.
It became one of the channel’s first viral successes.
Three months later, Brad used the release to claim ownership of every video featuring her.
He also produced a business agreement carrying her signature.
Hannah denied signing it.
By then, viewers knew her as the emotional girlfriend who regretted participating in content.
Nobody believed her.
She left Brad with debt attached to a small production company registered in her name.
“Why did you not report them?” I asked.
“I did.”
“What happened?”
“Brad showed the officer the consent video.”
“Did you have evidence of the original abandonment?”
“The camera at the roadside attraction had been broken for years.”
I thought of the gas station clerk preserving his system.
Without Walter’s cameras and Evelyn’s recording, Kyle would have created the same ending for me.
Hannah identified two other women.
One had dated Chase.
Another worked as a channel assistant.
Both described property being hidden, transportation being withheld, and signatures obtained after humiliating situations.
Not every event was illegal.
Not every participant had been forced.
That mixture protected the Mercers.
Real pranks created cover for coercive ones.
Willing participants made unwilling victims appear dishonest.
Rachel collected statements without promising a collective case would succeed.
Each woman had different documents and local laws.
The pattern still mattered.
Hannah also recognized the consulting payments to G M Advisory.
Grant Mercer contacted Brad during their engagement.
He called himself Uncle Grant around employees, pretending not to be their father.
Hannah once heard him instruct Kyle to keep companies in the women’s names because creditors trusted wives more than entertainers.
Kyle told me Grant was dead because he did not want me searching public records.
Evelyn opened the old federal case.
Grant had created a manual called Emotional Consent Conversion.
The phrase described a method.
Create distress.
Offer relief.
Obtain agreement.
Record gratitude.
Erase the distress from the final product.
The document had never become public because it was sealed during settlement negotiations.
Evelyn remembered it.
“The gas station was not spontaneous,” she said. “It followed the same sequence.”
I looked toward the sealed water bottle she had given me.
Kyle planned to use water as relief.
My medication as relief.
The truck as relief.
He expected gratitude after taking everything required for safety.
Then he would place a document in front of me.
Rachel discovered the acquisition agreement had been drafted by Martin Pike, the same attorney who represented Grant Mercer sixteen years earlier.
Pike now represented Kyle.
The father’s business model had become the sons’ content strategy.
A hearing was scheduled in Omaha because the abandonment, biometric fraud, and pending acquisition crossed several states.
Kyle requested temporary control of Mercer Road Media during the case.
His petition described me as medically unstable and incapable of managing a company.
Attached was a physician’s declaration from Dr. Nathan Nolan.
I had never met him.
Nolan claimed he reviewed my channel appearances and observed signs of panic disorder, memory impairment, and impulsive behavior.
The petition had been drafted three weeks before the road trip.
The date proved Kyle prepared to call me unstable before he left me in Nebraska.
Then Rachel found a proposed guardianship form inside the same file.
Kyle intended to become temporary controller of my finances if the heat caused a medical emergency.
My collapse had not merely been acceptable.
May you like
It had been useful.
Continue to the next part: Kyle’s incapacity petition collapses when the gas station audio reveals exactly how long he planned to leave Lena without medication.
