By six that morning I was in a private recovery suite at a downtown clinic, an IV finally delivering the pain management my body had been screaming for.

Ethan stood at the foot of the bed, reading a thick file on his tablet.

“The medical side is finished,” he said, his eyes locking on mine, cold and protective. “Now we do the audit.”

What Garrick and his mother had forgotten, across all their years of casual cruelty, was one detail: Garrick’s job as Chief Financial Officer at Thorne Logistics wasn’t something he’d earned.

Five years earlier, my father’s estate trust had put up the capital that saved his family’s firm from liquidation.

I was the primary trustee of that trust. And Vanguard’s lawyers held a sealed record of every transaction Garrick had run since our wedding.