With that one signature, I authorized the acquisition of Ostrander Freight.

By the time the markets opened on Monday, the Ostrander name would be folded entirely into the Carrington portfolio and would, in effect, cease to exist.

The empire that Baxter Ostrander had built on the blood money of my kidnapping twenty-eight years before was now mine — to take apart, and to rebuild into something clean.

Poetic justice, it turned out, was not only a concept.

It was a legally binding contract, and I had just signed it.

I want to be careful here, because there is a version of this ending that is only revenge, and that is not the version I chose or the woman I became.