I walked through the front doors of my childhood home just in time to watch my crippled father

With Vivian and Marcus locked in holding cells downtown, Hale Manor was finally silent.

I spent the afternoon helping Nurse Clara pack my father’s belongings. We loaded him into an ambulance bound for a top-tier private rehabilitation clinic in Austin—a facility far away from the toxic politics of Dallas, where he could receive proper medical treatment, physical therapy, and detox from the heavy narcotics Vivian had forced upon him.

Before the ambulance crew wheeled his stretcher out the front doors, my father reached up and took my hand.

The cloud of heavy sedation had finally begun to lift from his eyes. He looked at me with a mixture of immense gratitude and profound sorrow.

"Isabella..." he croaked out, his voice trembling. "I... I allowed them to drive you away. I was so blind after your mother died... I thought Vivian cared for us. I let her destroy our family."

I squeezed his hand tightly, bending down to kiss his weathered forehead. "You were grieving, Dad. And they exploited that. You don't have to carry that weight anymore. I'm taking care of it."

"The watch..." he whispered, looking at his bare wrist.

I pulled the evidence bag containing the gold Rolex from my purse—Detective Miller had granted me temporary custody of the heirloom after verifying the serial number. I unzipped the bag, took out the heavy gold watch, and carefully strapped it back onto my father’s thin wrist.

Tears welled in his eyes as he looked down at his wife's gift, restored to its rightful place.

"Thank you, my sweet girl," he choked out as the paramedics lifted the stretcher into the ambulance. "Bring our company home."

"I will," I promised.

After the ambulance pulled away, I returned inside the vast, empty mansion. The silence was deafening, but it was no longer heavy with defeat. It was clean.

My phone rang. It was Julian, my investigator.

"Isabella, we hit a snag," Julian reported, his tone tense. "Vivian’s attorney just posted bail for her and Marcus. They paid a two-million-dollar bond using cash from a secondary account in Miami that we didn't catch in the initial filing."

I narrowed my eyes. "Where are they now?"

"They’re heading straight for the company’s secondary server facility in Fort Worth," Julian warned. "Vivian knows the state audit is coming. She’s trying to wipe the off-site backup servers before federal agents can subpoena them tomorrow morning."

"She’s desperate," I said, walking toward my rental car. "She knows if those server logs survive, she’s going to federal prison for twenty years."