The morning sunlight bit through the small space in the window as it touched Nelson’s skin after months of staying in prison without a single ray of sunlight, which had made his skin pale. The warmth from the sun was so satisfying that he just wanted to hold the blanket tighter. But Lisa’s warm kiss touched his face. Her kiss was warmer than the sun. He opened his eyes to her pretty face and smile. Even though he wanted to sleep more, the look on her face was too cute for him to resist. “Hey, good morning.” Lisa said with a very light, beautiful smile resting on her lips, as the shirt she was wearing had slipped halfway off her shoulder. She continued speaking: “Rise and shine, my shining armor.” Nelson laughed hard as he held his stomach, feeling the pain from the pain of the gun that had hit his stomach. But none of that pain could compare to how he felt when he was around the ones he loved. He finally spoke up jokingly: “Night and shining armor needs more rest.” He cri

The boardroom felt different from how Nelson remembered it. Same long table. Same chairs. Same view of the city through the wide windows at the far end. But the room had a different quality to it now. The way a house felt different when it had been lived in by someone else for too long, and their presence had settled into the walls and the furniture and the air in ways that were hard to name but impossible to ignore. Nelson sat at the head of the table and looked at the faces arranged along both sides. Some of them he recognized. Some had been there before everything fell apart. Others were newer. Placed there during Karlus’s time for reasons that had nothing to do with competence or loyalty and everything to do with convenience. The man directly to his left had been speaking for several minutes. “The production numbers have not recovered the way we hoped. Karlus made agreements during his time in control that effectively undercut our relationships with three of our largest dist

The Dre Foundation opened on a Tuesday morning without any fanfare. Nathan had specifically asked for that. No cameras outside. No ribbon cutting. No speeches delivered to a crowd that had gathered to watch something begin. Just the doors opening at nine in the morning and the staff who had spent three months preparing for this day arriving at their desks and starting the work. Nathan arrived early. He stood outside the building for a few minutes before going in. It was a modest building. Not the kind of address that announced itself or tried to impress anyone who walked past it. Just a clean and well-maintained space on a street that people actually lived on and walked through every day. He had chosen it deliberately. The people who would come through these doors were not coming to be impressed by an address. They were coming because they needed something real and he wanted the building to feel like that from the moment they saw it. He went inside. The staff greeted him a

Lisa got there first. She had arrived twenty minutes early and chosen a table near the back of the restaurant, away from the windows and the entrance. Not because she was hiding exactly, but because she needed to be sitting down before Emily arrived. She needed a few minutes to hold herself together before she had to look at the person she had done the most damage to and say what she had come to say. She ordered water and did not drink it. She sat and looked at her hands on the table, trying not to think about everything those hands had been involved in over the last several years. The decisions. The moments when she had known something was wrong and had done it anyway because she had convinced herself that what she wanted was worth the cost she was making other people pay for it. She was still looking at her hands when Emily walked in. The security came first. Two of them. They moved through the restaurant with the quiet efficiency of people who were very good at their job, che

Lisa had been sitting in the waiting area for twenty minutes before her mother was brought in. She watched through the glass as the officer led Mrs Park to the seat on the other side and she took in every detail of what she was seeing and tried to reconcile it with the woman she had known her entire life. The orange uniform was the first thing. It should not have been the thing that hit hardest but it was. Her mother had always been particular about how she presented herself to the world. The right clothes. The right posture. The right expression assembled and in place before she walked into any room. Appearance had always been the first line of defence between Mrs Park and whatever she did not want the world to see about her. The uniform removed all of that. What was left underneath it was a woman who looked like she had aged significantly in less than two weeks. The eyes that had always been sharp and wide and reading every room they entered were sitting deeper in her face now