One year later, I stood on the front steps of the house on Benefit Street and watched the sun come up over Narragansett Bay.
The house had been restored. New paint. New windows. The French doors in the study had been replaced with ones exactly like the old ones. I’d had the carpenter match the trim by hand.
The company had a new name. Prescott Family Enterprises. New board. New accountants. An outside auditor that Margaret picked herself. A whistleblower hotline that went straight to Arthur, who’d come out of retirement just to run it.
“I’m too old for this,” he said every Monday morning. And then he came in every Monday morning anyway.
Lucas ran the restaurant division. He was better at it than anybody expected, including himself. He’d opened two new locations. He named one of them Gregory’s.
I left the Army. It was the hardest decision I ever made. But someone had to run my father’s company. And I’d learned something important that year.
Fighting for your country and fighting for your family aren’t as different as you’d think. You stand up. You don’t look away. You finish what you start.
My mother wrote to me from prison. Every two weeks.
Her letters were short. Careful. Full of apologies I wasn’t ready to accept yet. She asked about the house. About the roses in the backyard. About whether I was eating enough.
I read every one. I kept every one in a shoebox in my father’s study.
I haven’t written back yet. But I’m thinking about it. Someday, maybe.
And then there was Marcus.
Marcus Chen. Margaret’s son. A former Navy SEAL who now worked as a security consultant. He’d helped his mother with the investigation that winter, mostly by following me around Providence without my knowledge to make sure I didn’t get myself killed.
“You were very bad at following me,” I told him once.
“I was extremely good at following you. You just figured it out because you’re paranoid.”
“I prefer observant.”
“You’d pick a fight with a fire hydrant.”
We met properly during the trial. We bonded over bad coffee in the courthouse cafeteria and shared stories about deployments and the strange loneliness of coming home. Somewhere between the depositions and the verdict, we fell in love.
Margaret pretends she didn’t plan it. Nobody believes her.
Ethan Blake is a skilled Creative Content Specialist with a talent for crafting engaging and thought-provoking narratives. With a strong background in storytelling and digital content creation, Ethan brings a unique perspective to his role at TheArchivists, where he curates and produces captivating content for a global audience.
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