14. Wade
— ? —
Wade
Four years, three months, and seventeen days.
That’s how long it took to destroy my father.
For years I’d done nothing but make sure this day would come, that the man who’d taken everything from me would finally answer for all of it. And now he had. It didn’t give me back a single thing he’d stolen.
I knew where to look.
The courtroom was cold. Institutional. The kind of room designed to strip away humanity and reduce everything to procedure. I sat in the gallery wearing a suit that cost more than most people’s cars, watching my father stand before the judge like he still believed he could buy his way out of this.
He couldn’t.
“Alton Edward Buckley.” The judge’s voice was flat, almost bored. “You have been found guilty on all counts. This court sentences you to twenty years in federal prison.”
Twenty years.
My father was sixty years old. By the time he got out, if he got out, he’d be a broken old man. No more threats or control, no more terrorizing the people I loved.
I smiled.
It wasn’t a pleasant smile. I’d seen it in mirrors over the past four years, watched it replace the expression I used to have, the awkward earnestness that Luisa had somehow found charming.
That man was gone. In his place was a harder man.
Colder. The bastard my father had always wanted, though he’d never dreamed I’d turn it against him.
Alton caught my eye across the courtroom.
“You think you’ve won?” His voice was loud enough to carry, even as the bailiffs moved to take him. “You think this changes anything? You’re still my son. You’re still everything I made you.”
“No.” I stood up, straightening my jacket with deliberate precision. “I’m everything you couldn’t break. There’s a difference.”
He lunged.
The movement was sudden, sixty years old, but still strong and vicious, still believing that violence could solve what money couldn’t. He broke free of the bailiff’s grip for half a second, reaching for me with hands that had signed my death warrant more times than I could count.
They grabbed him before he got close.
“Get him out of here,” the judge said, sounding tired.
I watched them drag my father from the courtroom, his curses echoing off the institutional walls. The sound was deeply satisfying.
Outside, the November air was sharp. I stood on the courthouse steps, breathing in the cold, feeling lighter than I had in years. Four years, three months, seventeen days. It was over.
“Well.” The voice came from my left. “I hope you’re happy.”
Dolores Vandermeer stood just out of reach, her arms crossed over her designer coat, her face arranged in an expression of wounded dignity.
She’d aged in the past four years, not badly, but noticeably.
Lines around her eyes that hadn’t been there before.
A tightness to her mouth that spoke of expectations unmet.
“I am, actually.” I turned to face her fully. “Very happy.”
“You destroyed your own family. Your own father.”
“My father destroyed himself. I just made sure the world knew about it.”
“He was trying to help you.” Her voice cracked slightly. “He was trying to give you everything.”
“He threatened to kill my wife.” The words came out flat, factual. “He actually had someone run her off the road. Did you know that, Dolores? Did you know the price of your little fantasy of becoming Mrs. Wade Buckley was Luisa’s blood on a Boston sidewalk?”
Dolores’s face went pale.
“I didn’t-”
“Don’t.” I stepped closer, watching her flinch. “Don’t lie to me. I found the records. You were in my father’s office the day he made the threat. You heard everything. And you never said a word.”
“I was protecting you.”
“You were protecting yourself.” I let the disgust show on my face. “You knew he was going to hurt her, and you didn’t care. As long as you got what you wanted.”
“Wade, I loved you. I still-”
“Get away from me.” The words were quiet, but they cut like wire.
“You and I are not friends. We were never friends. And you should be grateful, grateful, Dolores, that you’re not in prison with him.
Because I considered it. I had enough evidence to put you away for conspiracy.
The only reason you’re standing here is because I decided your pathetic little life wasn’t worth the paperwork. ”
She looked like I’d slapped her.
Good.
“Don’t contact me again,” I said. “Don’t speak to me. Don’t even look at me. Because the next time we have a conversation, I won’t be so merciful.”
I walked away before she could respond.
My phone buzzed in my pocket. It wasn’t the lawyer or a reporter. It was a number I didn’t recognize, and a voice I’d been paying for six months to hear.
“Mr. Buckley.” The man was gruff, professional. “I found her.”
My heart stopped.
“Where?”
“Small town in Maine. Bellhaven. She’s been there about four years. Runs a dance studio.” A pause. “She’s not married.”
I was already moving, already dialing my pilot. Four years of not knowing whether she was alive, whether she was safe, whether she ever thought about me, and now there was a name on a map, and I couldn’t get to it fast enough.
“Prep the jet,” I told him. “Maine. Now.”
The flight was ninety-three minutes. I spent every one of them rehearsing what I’d say and throwing all of it out. There were no words for four years. There was only the need to stand in front of her and try.
Bellhaven appeared around a curve in the road, gray buildings, gray water, the smell of salt and fish. I parked badly, got out on unsteady legs, my chest tight, caught between hope and terror.
The diner was easy to find. Yellow paint. Warm lights. The smell of coffee and pie escaping every time the door swung open.
I walked toward it like a man approaching a bomb.
Through the window I could see people inside, an older woman behind the counter, customers at tables, the easy chaos of a small-town dinner service.
And then I saw her.
Luisa was standing by a booth, laughing at a joke I couldn’t hear. Relaxed. Happy. More herself than she’d been in the last poisoned months of our marriage. Four years had made her stronger somehow, steadier, like she’d finally found solid ground to stand on.
She was so beautiful it hurt to breathe.
And then a little girl scrambled up onto the stool beside her.
Three, maybe. All wild dark hair and round cheeks, swinging her legs, talking to the coffeemaker like it was a person. Luisa reached out without even looking and steadied her, the automatic hand of a mother who’d done it without thinking.
A mother.
The girl turned her head, and the diner light caught her face, and I forgot how to breathe.
Her eyes. Light blue, the exact cold blue I’d hated my whole life because it belonged to my father, because it belonged to me. Except on her it wasn’t cold at all. On her it was lit up with the pure, uncomplicated joy of being small and adored.
My eyes. My hair. My-
The math did itself before I could stop it. Four years. A little girl who couldn’t be older than three. Luisa, walking out of our brownstone the same night I let her believe I’d chosen someone else.
She’d been pregnant.
She’d been pregnant when she left, and she had never told me, and I had missed all of it, every first, every year, an entire person who was half mine, because I’d built a wall so high and so convincing that my own wife had crossed a country to get away from the man I was pretending to be.
I had a daughter.
I had a daughter, and she didn’t know I existed.
My hand pressed flat to the cold glass, the only thing keeping me upright.
And inside the diner, Luisa turned toward the window.
Our eyes met.
For one endless moment everything stopped, the town, the noise, the four years of silence. There was only her face going white, her hand closing hard around the little girl’s shoulder, her mouth shaping a word I couldn’t hear through the glass.
My name.
And there I was on the sidewalk, a stranger in my own skin, all tattoos and hard edges and four years of rage, watching my past and my future collide in a yellow-lit diner in a town I hadn’t known existed an hour ago.
And I was going to be sick.