Chapter Forty-Three Jenn
Chapter Forty-Three
Jenn
Monday morning
The sun is just coming up when Kellogg and I pull into the driveway of Julian’s bungalow in Coconut Grove.
We’ve been up all night, excavating every horror we could from those hundreds of pages—coffee fueled, bleary eyed, vibrating with the kind of anger that keeps you awake long after your body gives up.
As it turns out, Dr. Cassandra Middleton, Kellogg’s wife, is the behavioral-health compliance director for Jackson Health, with one foot in the state licensing board.
She spent the night calling in favors across hospital social work, child-welfare liaisons, and ethics committees.
By sunrise, she’d stitched together enough off-the-record confirmations to turn Julian’s “research notes” into a prosecutable pattern.
Not everything clicked into place—but enough did.
Enough to know Julian Braithwaite had been playing God, and he’d gotten away with it for a very long time.
Despite the early hour, there’s a light on in the kitchen. For a moment we sit there in the car, staring at it, the silence between us thick as the humid morning air.
Then he says quietly, “Ready?”
I nod.
“Yeah. Time to end this.”
Moments later, we’re standing on Julian’s front porch.
“David,” Julian says, surprised. His eyes move to me, and for a beat, delighted confusion overtakes everything else—the suspicion he should feel drowned out by the novelty of seeing two supposed adversaries standing side by side.
Of course he notices the puzzle before the danger; Julian has always been far more fascinated by people as patterns than threats.
“And Jennifer. Together. Well, this is certainly a surprise.”
“Julian,” David says. “We need to speak with you. It’s urgent.”
His arms lift in a theatrical gesture.
“Well, then—by all means, please, come in.”
We follow him into the kitchen. He lights a burner beneath a kettle, reaches for a cup.
“Tea?” he asks over his shoulder.
“No, thank you,” David answers for both of us.
“Well, I hope you don’t mind if I make one for myself. It is rather early,” he says pointedly. “So—what brings you here this morning?”
His back is to us as he fusses with the tea bag.
“I had a long conversation with Sam Kinski last night,” I say, watching his posture stiffen.
He doesn’t turn.
“So she turned up again? After escaping the hospital?”
“Escaping?” I echo. “Interesting choice of words. She was always free to leave anytime she liked. Or was she, Julian?”
He spins around, mug clutched tight in his hand.
“Meaning what, exactly, Jennifer?”
“Just that she revealed some very disturbing things about you.”
A beat. Then:
“I’m not sure what she could have possibly said. I don’t know the woman.”
“Don’t you, though?” David asks.
Julian lifts his brows, all polite disbelief.
“You know I don’t, David. I believed her to be Mary—just as you did. Before that, I’d only ever laid eyes on her once, at a Thanksgiving dinner at Terry and Doug’s home. Five years ago.”
“Tell me, Julian,” David says. “Have you looked through your patient journals lately?”
That gets him.
A flicker—calculation mixed with unease.
“The ones here at home? Not in a few days. Why do you ask?”
“Because if you checked your closet, you’d find a few missing. A few dozen of them, actually.”
“Really?” His attempted chuckle collapses halfway through. “And what makes you think that’s the case?”
“Because they’re sitting in an evidence locker down at the police precinct right now,” David says.
The air shifts. Julian’s hand tightens on the counter.
“You—you broke into my home . . . and stole my files?”
“Actually, Sam gave them to me,” I say.
His face reddens.
“And you took it upon yourself to read through my patients’ notes?”
“Yeah,” David says coolly. “All twenty-six volumes of them.”
“You had no right!” Julian snaps. “Those are confidential—clinical materials.”
“Please,” I say. “Spare us the righteous indignation. The evidence is all there, in your own handwriting. You split those girls up. You engineered every variable of their lives just to watch what would happen. You preyed on Doug and Terry, made them unwitting accomplices. And what about their biological parents? Did you victimize them too?”
He doesn’t even attempt to deny it.
He waves a hand.
“The mother was a teenager living on the streets. No family. No idea who the father was when she walked into the adoption agency I worked with and offered to sell them. Sell them. Her words. She saw her children as a commodity. When she died in childbirth, it was . . . ideal. Fortuitous.”
David’s voice sharpens. “And when Sam and Mary met? Fortuitous too?”
Julian exhales, almost fondly.
“I never expected them to find each other. Statistically impossible. But when the story broke—twins reunited, the world enthralled—I realized it could be . . . useful. A natural endpoint to the study.”
“Useful,” David repeats.
Julian nods eagerly.
“Exposure brings data. Patterns of attachment, shared memory formation—it was like watching my own experiment unfold in real time.”
Bile rises in my throat. I force it down. He clocks my disgust and smiles—thin, wistful, chilling.
“I did what had to be done. Everyone talks about nature versus nurture, but no one’s willing to face the cost. I don’t know what it is you think those journals prove. From where I’m standing, they’re nothing but notes for a longitudinal study.”
“Oh, I’m aware,” David says with a humorless huff. “And you should be aware how damning they are.”
Julian’s tone shifts—defensiveness morphing into pride.
The mask of benevolence hardens.
“Damning? You think this is about guilt? Identical twins, controlled environments—this is work that will be studied for generations.”
“In ethics courses, maybe,” I mutter.
His eyes flash.
“How dare you mock me. I made you, Jennifer. And look what you’ve become.”
The words land heavier than I expect.
But I refuse to give him an inch.
“We know you had a sexual relationship with Sam,” I say. “And before you call it consensual—she was fifteen. That’s rape.”
The kettle whistles. Julian turns it off, buying himself a moment. When he faces us again, he’s settled into an eerie calm.
“Is that what she told you?” He waves a hand. “Samantha was lost. Unstable. I gave her stability. I gave her . . . affection. In her troubled mind, it became something more.”
“She got pregnant, Julian,” David says.
He flinches, then shrugs.
“Unfortunate. She didn’t want to disclose the father,” he responds easily, the lie obviously practiced. “She certainly wasn’t equipped to be a mother. So I did what I had to—I ensured the child was adopted into a loving family.”
“You took that baby from her,” I say quietly.
“She wasn’t capable of raising it. I did what was necessary for her progress—and mine.”
“So a DNA test would prove the child’s not yours?” David asks.
“Of course.”
A beat.
“Though it was a sealed adoption—out of state. No trail.”
Kellogg leans in, that familiar sneer curving his mouth.
“You’d be surprised what I can get done,” he murmurs.
Julian blinks. Fear flickers, then vanishes behind bluster.
“You’re bluffing.”
David straightens with a shrug.
“You know what your problem is, Julian? Well—aside from the whole ‘evil genius’ thing . . .” He gestures broadly.
“It’s your hubris. You always assumed the rest of us were too dim to uncover your little mind games.
And while we may not have filled in every blank yet, we’ve got a lot more this morning than we did last night. ”
He steps closer.
“And even as we speak, officials are combing through every page of every file of every patient you ever had. Internal investigators, ethics committees, the child-welfare division, licensing boards—hell, even adoption-placement partners. They’re all being notified.
Every sealed record you manipulated? Every placement you influenced? It’s all being unraveled.”
His voice drops.
“I will find that little girl. And when I do, a DNA test and a calendar will be all we need to prove you raped a minor. A patient.”
Julian’s voice rises, cracking. “You think this ends me? You have no idea who you’re dealing with. My research will—”
“It’s over, Julian,” I cut in, low and sharp. “Forget about saving your career—you won’t have one by the time the sun sets. Not after today.”
That lands. A small, sharp fracture appears in his mask.
Kellogg steps in beside me, voice flat and professional in a way that makes it infinitely more threatening. “We notified the detectives this morning,” he says. “They’ve secured a warrant. Police are en route to execute it at this address.”
Julian goes very still.
Kellogg continues, “Every journal, every draft, every scrap of documentation you’ve ever taken home—they’ll seize all of it. You won’t get a chance to destroy anything. Not this time.”
A pulse kicks hard in Julian’s temple. The color drains from his face only to come flooding back in ugly patches.
“You don’t—” His voice cracks again. “You don’t understand what you’re interfering with.”
“I understand perfectly,” I say. “You’ve been hiding behind terminology and theory and your own ego for a long time. But the minute law enforcement has your notes in hand, the translation is going to be . . . illuminating.”
His hands clench at his sides, shaking.
“I made Samantha strong,” he hisses, tapping his own chest with a trembling finger. “I gave her affection. Purpose. I was the architect of Mary Langston’s fairy-tale life. I’ve accomplished more in twenty-five years than the two of you ever will—combined!”
He is shouting now, red faced, breath coming too fast, sweat gathering at his hairline. He looks seconds from unraveling completely.
I have no intention of being here when he does.
We turn to leave. Kellogg pauses, lifts a finger as if remembering something, and turns back.
“In case you missed it, Julian—you’re fired. Your privileges at Miami Killian have been revoked. And I’ve already called the medical licensing board. You’ll never practice again.”
I see it then—the moment it sinks in. Rage collapses into something smaller. Trembling. Fear.
The moment a man realizes the game is over, and he was the last one to know.
There’s no satisfaction in it. Only inevitability.
Back outside, a mockingbird chatters above us, and a lone cicada buzzes awake, its steady drone cutting through the heat.
“Should we wait for the police?” I ask as we walk back to the car.
“Probably.” He glances down at his watch. “Detective Rivera said he’d have someone here within the hour.”
“Yeah, and we might need to call in the fire department too. He’s just unhinged enough to try and burn the place down.”
“Wouldn’t surprise me one bit,” he says as we reach the car and climb into our respective seats.
We sit silently, staring through the windshield at the house, silent and calm despite the bomb that’s just been detonated inside.
I notice him giving me the side-eye.
“What?” I ask.
“Just wondering what you’re smiling at.”
My hand reaches to touch my lips.
“Huh. I didn’t realize I was.”
“Oh yeah. Big ol’ grin. Was that about him?”
I shake my head.
“No. It’s about you.”
“Me?”
I shrug.
“I think I might be starting to like you,” I say, holding up my thumb and forefinger a fraction apart. “Just a little.”
He smiles.
“Well, funny thing that—”
Before he can finish his thought, a sharp crack splits the morning.
A gunshot. Violent, unmistakable.
The mockingbird rockets skyward.
Kellogg jerks toward the house.
At the same second I go still, eyes closing.
I always tell my patients to honor their own feelings. You feel what you feel—regardless of what seems to be appropriate in the moment. In this moment I don’t feel shock or horror. I feel release . . . and relief.
Somewhere deep inside, in the quiet place I’ve kept barricaded for years, something loosens.
Julian Braithwaite can’t hurt me anymore. Maybe he never could. Not really.
This isn’t the first note of another nightmare.
It’s the last breath of the old one.
The world is still tilted, still finding its tempo.
But for the first time—I can feel it turning toward the sun.