Beatrice Thorne had been forced to liquidate her historic Gold Coast mansion just to afford the retaining fees for her criminal-defense attorneys. Her charity boards stripped her of her titles before the ink on the indictments was even dry.

As for Julian, he was currently residing in a federal detention center, awaiting trial without the possibility of bail. The hubris that made him a monster had also made him incredibly sloppy.

When Homeland Security cracked open his servers, they didn’t just find evidence of extortion. They uncovered a web of falsified hiring and immigration paperwork used to underpay and coerce the foreign nurses on his staff, millions in illegal pharmaceutical kickback networks, systemic patient intimidation, and insurance fraud on a scale large enough to guarantee he’d be buried beneath a federal penitentiary—taking his powerful country-club friends down with him.

Healing, however, is rarely as clean as a legal victory.

Chloe still woke up screaming in the dead of night, her body remembering the heavy impact of a boot that was no longer there. The shadows in the house still sometimes looked like him.

But as the months passed, the nightmares thinned. And eventually I heard the greatest sound in the world: my daughter, laughing from the kitchen, free and unburdened.