He’d have hated what I let the success cost, the way I’d taken the one true thing he tried to teach me and turned it upside down, building monuments to a name while letting the actual family behind the name thin out to almost nothing.

Naming my son after him felt like the first honest thing I’d done in years — a small promise, made over an incubator, to raise a boy who would know from his first breath that he was the foundation and everything else was only the house.

Chapter 16 — The Only Empire

The glass doors at the end of the NICU corridor banged open an hour later, and my mother came down the hall at speed with two of the company’s security officers hurrying to keep pace with her, her tailored suit immaculate, her face white with fury.

“Wesley!” she called through the observation window.