2026-06-10 16:18:53I decided that I'd follow Henry's advice. Emma was thinking that she was smarter than me maybe but she had no clue what was going to happen.
I wanted to call her back but decided against it. I didn't want to rush anything right now. I knew I should probably go home and think about it before going in fully. I was already super excited to see Lily. I haven't seen her for like 8 hours since last night. She was still sleeping when I woke up to prepare for work. Just like I suspected she was waiting for me at the garage with a book in her hand. “Brother. Where have you been?” She was literally shouting at the tip of her voice. I heard her but didn't answer until I got down from the car. She in fact came to meet me. “Aren't you going to talk to me?” Her voice was now calmer behind me as I shut the door of the car. “Of course, I will.” I bent to her level. “What are you doing here?” “I was just waiting for you. I miss you.” She spread out her arms for a hug. It was a warm hug exactly what I needed at the moment. “I miss you too.” I was tired but I needed to manage through this night because Lily was asking me to make dinner for her. “Is Mrs. Pack home?” I asked. “She is but I want to eat your food. It's been a while too.” She said and I agreed. It has truly been a while since I made food for Lily and I wanted to. The first day I attempted to do it to impress her, she couldn't believe that I had made that meal. I was a good cook because at the Pierce home, I was the one who handled everything in the kitchen. I cooked, I prepped the meal, I washed the dishes and still they treated me like trash. I guess they never thought I'd break through from that pain they cursed me. Thinking about it, what audacity did that family have that made them mistreat me but still made me do their dishes. I mean that was literally a dangerous game they played. I could have decided to poison them or do something else. I didn't regret my actions. At that time, I just wanted freedom. I wanted to leave no matter what so I kept doing everything they asked me to do. “Alright. What do you want to eat?” I asked, coming back to reality. “Well, stir fry pasta will do the trick.” Lily responded. Hand in hand, we walked to the kitchen where Mrs Park was. “Good evening, Sir.” She greeted me. I told her so many times not to call me since she was obviously older than me but she never for once listened to me. Making stir fry was never a difficult thing to make. I learnt it very early even when my mother was still alive. It was just one food but to me, it was the best food I'd ever eaten. When I missed my mum or thought of her, I thought of stir fry spag. Maybe that is what I should do. Mrs. Park made her way to me. She collected my laptop bag and offered to go drop it in my room since I was taking over her job for today. I didn't want to bother her but she really didn't seem bothered anyways. She seemed happy that I was going to relieve some kind of stress for her. I smiled. I was always happy to rest, I just hoped that Lily wouldn't ask so many questions this time. “Lily, what are we starting with?” She asked and I looked at her. “What do you mean by we?” She was still thinking when I answered my own question. “There's nothing like We. I'll be here making the food while you remain there.” I pointed at the other side of the counter. “..watching me.” “But..” She was about to protest. “Are you going to abide by my rules or should I let Mrs. Pack know that she'll be the one making dinner tonight?” She couldn't argue anymore. I mean what else could she say to add to mine. I was happy she listened and did not try to act tough. I was too tired for that. “Qre you okay?” She asked, suddenly. I was a bit taken back when I heard her ask me that. “Because I asked you to stay over there?” “No.. because you look sad.” “Tired.” I corrected it. “That's understandable. Maybe a date could solve that.” I looked up at her again. A date? Oh no. I just hoped Emma wasn't feeding her things, I just hope so. “Baby. I'm not planning on going on any dates with Emma..” “Aunt Emma? No.. I'm talking about Aunt Yemi.” She had a pretty smile on her face. “You mean she told you about it?” “No, I asked her. You could say I disturbed her till she split the milk.” I didn't stop glaring at this little stubborn lady in front of me. I couldn't just explain how she made people do things. She always thought herself to be a boss and truly she had proven it to me that she was the boss. “Why were you interested in our conversation?” I asked, going back to cutting my already wasted carrot trying so hard to pretend that I wasn't being monitored by my own niece. It seemed I wasn't even asking the proper questions. “How do you know what a date means? “Well, a classmate of mine mentioned it. He said his parents go on lots of dates so I asked him what it meant.” “So I'm guessing Yemi never said it was a date. You only assumed.” “Yes, a date is a good thing according to Marcel and because he talks about it, I'd like to go on a date soon too.” “Well, that won't be happening anytime soon.” I whispered loud enough so she could hear me but I looked at her, she was smiling. “She's really very nice and pretty. She was so pretty in that purple dress.”
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chapter 167
The formal charges arrived three weeks after Margaret's statement, delivered through official channels that moved, for once, with a speed that surprised even Patricia."Swiss federal prosecutors have filed charges," she told me, reading from a translated summary her office had received that morning, the two of us standing in the study while Henry listened from his usual chair near the window. "Breach of fiduciary duty regarding the trust's charitable designation. Falsification of the foundation's stated purpose across multiple regulatory filings. And, most significantly, a charge the prosecutors are calling institutional endangerment of minors, built specifically around the testimony the forty-three former students have now formally provided."I sat with that for a long moment, the particular weight of it settling into something I had not entirely expected to feel — not triumph exactly, though there was some of that threaded through it, but something closer to a genuine, sober gravity
chapter 166
I called Sandra that same afternoon, and told her everything — the meeting at the restaurant, the recording, Margaret's precise offer, and my decision. She was quiet for a long moment after I finished, and when she spoke, her voice carried a particular careful weight I had come to recognise, across two significant stories together, as the sound of a journalist genuinely moved by something beyond the story itself. "I want to be honest with you," she said. "I would have understood if you'd taken the deal. I would not have thought less of you for it. Protecting your family and your company from years of continued litigation is not a small thing to weigh against one woman's privacy, particularly a woman who has already, by every account, suffered a genuine reckoning." "I know," I said. "I almost did take it. Two days of almost taking it, honestly." "What changed," Sandra asked. "My seven-year-old cousi
chapter 165
Lily was at the kitchen table the next morning, methodically arranging her cereal into what I had come to understand was a private, evolving system of classification, when I sat down across from her instead of taking my usual seat. She looked up immediately, reading, as she always did, that something in the shape of the morning had changed. "You're doing the thinking face," she said. "The really serious one. Not the company one. The other one." "I have a question for you," I said. "A real one. I want you to think about it properly before you answer, the way you always do." She set down her spoon, giving me the particular full, undivided attention she reserved for exactly these moments, and I found myself, looking at her small, serious face, grateful, not for the first time, that I had never once made the mistake of treating her seriousness as something smaller than an adult's. "The woman who tried to visit your school," I said carefully. "Margaret. She's asked me for somethin
chapter 164
I did not sleep well that night, and I did not sleep well the two nights after it either.Patricia came to the mansion the following morning, and I laid the offer out for her exactly as Margaret had given it to me, watching her expression shift through several careful stages as she worked through the legal architecture of what was actually being proposed."This is a genuinely favourable settlement, from a purely legal standpoint," she said, once I had finished. "Full withdrawal of her claim. Cessation of the share accumulation. Formal severing from Hargrove, which would very likely finish whatever remains of his shareholder coalition, since he has no independent resources of his own to continue funding it. If you accepted this today, the corporate threat that has occupied a significant portion of this family's attention for months would simply end.""And the cost," I said."The cost is narrower than it sounds," Patricia said carefully. "She is not asking you to suppress the story of R
chapter 163
I thought about Margaret sitting across from me in that quiet hotel sitting room, speaking about her father's cruelty and her own thirty years of silence. I thought about how convincingly she had described a woman who had kept her distance from the family's worst patterns. And I understood, with a sudden, cold clarity, that the woman in those letters, patient, warm, relentlessly invested in shaping the lives of children she had never publicly acknowledged, was not the woman who had described herself to me.Or perhaps she was exactly the same woman, and I had simply been shown only the version she chose.---The regulatory pressure intensified through the following week, and I found myself following it the way one follows a storm on a weather map, tracking each new front as it moved across the continent.A Swiss newspaper obtained and published a partial list of the Vane trust's donations to Ravensbrook, revealing that the annual payments had increased sharply in the two years followin
chapter 162
The collapse did not begin in the city where I lived. It began, as Henry explained it to me over the phone at six in the morning, four thousand miles away, in a glass-fronted office building in Geneva, where a Swiss financial regulator had opened a formal inquiry into the Vane Family Trust barely thirty-six hours after Sandra's article ran."The regulator cited the article directly in its notice," Henry said, his voice carrying the particular clipped precision he adopted when he had been awake for a long time and had not yet allowed himself to feel anything about what he had learned. "Not as evidence, but as the reason the inquiry was opened. It requires the trust to produce records of every payment made to Ravensbrook Academy across its entire operating history, and to explain the purpose of each one."I sat up in bed, the grey pre-dawn light barely beginning to soften the edges of the curtains."Every payment," I said. "Forty years of them.""Forty years of them," Henry agreed. "Swi
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