Chapter 19 #2
“Dad invested everything he and Mom built together with a man he trusted, a man everyone in town trusted. Retirement money, college savings for me, all of it.” Her voice thinned. “It was a Ponzi scheme. Textbook. By the time anyone realized what was happening, there was nothing left.”
She could feel the words resisting. Coming in pieces, with gaps between them that Isaac had to wait through. He didn’t rush her. He let her speak at her own pace.
“Watching him after—” She stopped again.
Pressed her palm flat against the mattress.
“After we lost everything, Dad shrank. That’s the only word for it.
He became someone I didn’t recognize. He couldn’t look at us.
Couldn’t look at himself. The shame of it, of being fooled, of losing everything, of failing his family. It ate him alive.”
“Fallon.”
“He died. I was eighteen.” The fact of it was blunt and she left it that way. “The shame killed him as much as anything physical. I understood that, even then. I was old enough to understand exactly what had happened and exactly who was responsible.”
She needed a breath. He gave her one. His hand shifted on the mattress, his thumb brushing the side of her hand. A graze. An offer.
“My mother came apart after that. Slower. Crueler. Years of watching someone disappear in front of you. I took care of her. Held things together for a few years, handled the bills, worked whatever I could find. When everyone else was out partying or going to college, I was keeping a household running on nothing while the woman who’d raised me forgot how to get out of bed.
” Her voice caught. She steadied it. “She died three years ago. Then all I had was my own anger.”
She could still taste it.
“The man who did it to us, to the entire town, was caught and charged.” She shook her head.
“But he had so much money and was able to buy his way out of the worst of it. He got two years, all suspended. No jail time. If I thought I was angry before, it was nothing compared to my rage when I heard that.”
“Understandable.”
“And there was nothing I could do. Even worse, once I started researching, I realized there was a whole class of people exactly like him. Untouchable. Protected by money and lawyers and a system that was designed to look the other way. Free to destroy lives without consequence. White collar crimes. Victimless. And my parents were dead.”
Isaac hadn’t moved. Hadn’t shifted, hadn’t made a sound. He was giving her the only thing she needed right now: a witness.
“So yeah, that’s what started me down this current path.
The moment I decided wasn’t dramatic. There wasn’t a lightning bolt or a single breaking point.
It was just everything converging. The anger and the grief and the understanding of how the system actually works.
I realized that the people who’d destroyed my family, people like them, would keep doing it.
Over and over. Because nobody stopped them. ”
Her jaw tightened and her hand closed into a fist on the bed.
“So I became the consequence the system wouldn’t provide.”
She let that sit.
“I went after him eventually. The man who destroyed us. He wasn’t my first target.
He was my third. Just another name on a list. He never knew it was me.
” She paused. “And I’m okay with that. He lost a shit-ton of money and the respect of everyone in his circle.
I made sure he didn’t have a friend left to his name. ”
“How many have you taken down total?” Isaac’s voice was low.
“Twelve. In three years. But there are so many more. Always more. Whatever I steal, I fence and give back to the victims. I only keep what I need to survive.”
He exhaled. A long, controlled breath through his nose.
The silence that followed was heavy and still. She felt scraped clean. Three years of carrying this alone, and now it was in the room between them. Messy, raw, and she had no idea what he’d do with it.
She began to shake. Not crying, she was well past tears. But the shaking she couldn’t stop.
Isaac’s hand closed over hers. She looked down at it. His palm was warm and steady, his fingers careful around her damaged wrist. He didn’t squeeze. Just held.
She leaned forward, her forehead finding his shoulder, and she stayed there.
He brought his other hand up to the back of her head. His fingers slid into her hair and rested there. He breathed slowly, deliberately, keeping himself anchored so she could come apart.
They stayed like that until the shaking in her chest subsided and her breathing evened out.
Then he pulled back. Held her face in both hands. Looked at her with something she couldn’t deflect and didn’t try to.
“What you’re doing,” he said. “The way you’re doing it. It’s going to end one of two ways.”
“Isaac—”
“You’re going to get caught and go to prison, or you’re going to end up dead.
There is no third option. Sooner or later, someone is going to connect the pattern.
Or you’re going to be on a wall when your body quits.
” His thumbs moved against her cheekbones.
“The way it quit last night because of the hEDS.”
She pulled back from his hands. Of course, Cassandra had explained it all to him. That’s how he’d known how to take care of her. “My body has always—”
“Your body almost killed you twelve hours ago. You couldn’t grip a ledge. Your knee gave out twenty feet off the ground. If I hadn’t been in that building—”
She rubbed her eyes. “I know. Every job takes a toll. I know that.”
“Then you know what I’m about to say.”
“That I can’t keep doing this.”
“That you can’t keep doing this.”
She stood up. Her knee screamed but held. She took three steps toward the window and stopped, her back to him, her arms wrapped around herself.
“You’re asking me to stop,” she said. “Just stop.”
“Yes.”
“And do what? Pretend I don’t know what I know?
Pretend those people aren’t out there right now, doing to other families exactly what was done to mine?
” She turned. “There are twelve targets behind me and dozens more ahead. Families who will never see justice unless someone steps in. You want me to walk away from that.”
“I want you to be alive.”
“I am alive. This is what being alive looks like for me.”
“Last night is what being alive looks like?” His voice rose for the first time. “Hanging off a wall with no grip and no way down? That’s your version of living?”
She opened her mouth and closed it. The argument she wanted to make, that she was careful, that she was good, that she’d done this dozens of times, died in her throat.
Because she had been careful. She was good.
And her body had quit on her anyway.
“I can’t just stop.”
He stared at her. She stared back.
He was right. She knew he was right. Every word he’d said was true and she felt the truth of it in her wrist and her knee and the deep exhaustion in her chest. Her body was running out of credit.
The deal she’d been striking with her own skeleton for three years, the one that said she could keep going, keep climbing, keep pushing past what her joints could sustain. That deal had collapsed on a wall in Chattanooga and nearly killed her.
But it didn’t matter.
She couldn’t stop.