Reed’s smile was small but genuine. “Then let’s go home.”
I walked down the porch steps and didn’t look back. As Reed opened the passenger door for me, I heard Lester shouting something about lawyers and courts and ungrateful children. I heard Vicki crying. I heard Knox calling my name, confused and maybe a little afraid.
But I was already moving forward, climbing into the warmth of Reed’s car, closing the door on fifteen years of lies and stolen futures.
As we pulled away from the South Hill house, Reed glanced over at me. “You okay?”
I pulled the ten-dollar bill out of my pocket and looked at it—the bill Lester had thrown at me like I was worth nothing, like I was the mistake instead of what he’d done to me.
“Yeah,” I said, and realized I meant it. “I think I’m going to be okay.”
“Good,” Reed said. “Because we have a lot to talk about, and a lot to fix. But first—are you hungry? Because I’ve been driving for six hours and I’m starving.”
I laughed, surprising myself. “I could eat.”
“Excellent. I know a place that makes the best burgers you’ve ever tasted. And while we eat, you can tell me about yourself. Not the version Lester knew. The real you.”
As we drove away from South Hill, leaving behind the mothball house and the clearance-rack birthdays and the man who’d stolen my future to buy his son’s comfort, I felt something I hadn’t felt in so long I’d forgotten what it was called.
Hope.
The legal battle took eighteen months. Holly Brennan filed emergency motions that removed Lester as my trustee and guardian within a week, appointing Reed as temporary guardian while the courts sorted out the rest. The accounting of the trust revealed that of the original three hundred twenty-five thousand dollars, only ninety-three thousand remained. The rest had been systematically stolen—withdrawals documented with fabricated receipts for orthodontia I’d never received, tutoring I’d never had, school supplies that had actually gone to Knox.
Lester and Vicki hired lawyers who argued that every expense had been legitimate, that they’d raised me well and I was ungrateful, that the trust language was ambiguous. But the evidence was damning. Bank statements showed withdrawals that coincided with boat purchases, car leases, and Knox’s expensive hockey career. And I sat in that witness chair, sixteen years old in a borrowed dress, and told the truth about clearance racks and mothballs and listening through the kitchen door while they decided how much of my future to spend on themselves.
The judge didn’t just remove Lester as trustee. She ordered him to repay every stolen dollar with interest, awarded me the remaining trust funds plus damages, and referred the case to criminal prosecutors. Lester avoided jail by agreeing to a repayment plan that would take him twenty years to complete, and by giving up any claim to guardianship or contact with me.
The Range Rover was sold. The boat they’d already sold was accounted for. Their house—the one I’d grown up in—went into foreclosure when they couldn’t make the payments without my trust fund to supplement their income.
I tried not to feel satisfied watching it all collapse. Mostly I failed.
Reed took me to his home on Lake Cain, two hours outside of Spokane, a house built of glass and cedar that looked out over water so clear you could see straight through to the stones beneath. It was nothing like the cramped rooms of South Hill. It was space and light and quiet, and for the first three months I lived there, I kept waiting for the catch, for the moment Reed would reveal what he wanted in exchange for his kindness.
The catch never came.
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