Chapter 37
Several months later
“Baylee!” His name practically sang out of me, bright and delighted, as if I’d spotted an old friend across a crowded party rather than a man sitting behind a sheet of reinforced glass in prison.
He couldn’t hear me, of course. The glass made sure of that. But he could see my face, and apparently that was enough. His jaw tightened. His eyes narrowed. He knew exactly who I was calling.
Then he turned and started to leave.
I stayed where I was.
I didn’t call after him. Didn’t wave. I simply sat there with my hands folded, watching him go and waiting for the inevitable moment when curiosity proved stronger than pride.
It took less than a minute.
He stopped. His shoulders went still as he stood there, visibly wrestling with himself, and I could see the argument taking place behind his eyes.
I smiled. “Remembered no one else would come visit you?”
Fifteen years.
That was what they had given him. Fifteen years for a lifetime spent constructing an empire around a name he’d lied, manipulated, and schemed to preserve, only to have that entire legacy reduced to a number printed on a sentencing sheet.
Mrs. Morris had testified against him. She had raised Cassandra.
She had watched Michael raise her, too. She had seen what happened behind closed doors—the conditioning, the isolation, the years of teaching a girl to think of herself as something owned rather than someone who belonged to herself, a product rather than a person.
She had painted the picture of a man who had spent his entire life learning how to turn people into possessions and, eventually, into casualties. The jury had believed her.
Liam’s evidence had been the final nail.
Money laundering. Enough of it, and enough evidence of it, to make sure there was no tidy little escape route waiting for Michael on the other side of his conviction.
No secret reserve of money. No company he could quietly reclaim.
No carefully constructed future in which he walked away bruised but wealthy, leaving everyone else to clean up what remained.
Henry had gotten immunity for his testimony and probation for his part in everything that had happened. He’d been given the chance to walk away, too, with the possibility of having his record sealed once he proved he wasn’t going to make the same mistake twice.
He would carry what he did for the rest of his life.
But he would carry it outside of a prison cell.
Michael ground his teeth so hard I could see the muscle pulsing beneath his skin.
“What do you want?”
“Don’t be like that, Baylee.” I leaned back in my chair and made myself comfortable, because if there was one thing I had earned, it was the right to enjoy this. “I come bearing news.”
His expression darkened.
“So, what do you want to hear about first?” I tilted my head thoughtfully. “Your kids?”
A pause.
“Or your company?”
I let the silence sit between us for precisely the amount of time necessary to make him nervous.
“Just kidding.” I smiled. “I know it’s your company.”
His face flushed red. His fingers curled around the edges of the chair.
I loved it.
“Your company is…”
I drummed my fingers against the counter. Paused. Smiled.
“Bankrupt.”
His eyes widened. For one beautiful second, all the arrogance disappeared from his face. The color drained from his skin. “What? No, that’s not possible.” His voice sharpened with panic. “Liam wouldn’t let that happen—”
I laughed. I genuinely couldn’t help it. The sound bounced off the glass and filled the little visiting room. “Oh, this is going to be so good.”
He glared at me.
“Liam is the reason.” I leaned closer. “He made sure everything you did came back to destroy that company. Every shell corporation. Every laundered dollar. Every person you stepped on while climbing to the top.”
I watched the realization creep across his face, slow and ugly.
“He made sure they all had a seat at the table when the vultures came to pick the bones clean.”
It had been almost embarrassingly easy.
Once the money-laundering charges went public, the ship was already taking on water.
Investors panicked. Partners vanished. People who had spent years praising Michael’s genius suddenly developed very pressing reasons to distance themselves from him, and the foundation he had devoted decades to building began crumbling in a matter of weeks.
Liam simply made sure it stayed under.
He started with the best employees.
Quietly. Carefully. He offered them positions that didn’t technically breach their non-competes, giving just enough room between the letter of the law and the spirit of it to keep everyone comfortable.
The ones he couldn’t hire, he recommended elsewhere with such glowing enthusiasm that they barely had time to wonder whether they should feel guilty about leaving.
He made sure they landed on their feet.
The company was gone. The legacy was ash. And Michael Baylee ended up sitting across from me in a prison visitor’s room, drowning in a jumpsuit that didn’t fit properly, with nothing left except the name he had stolen and the years he had left to serve.
It was almost poetic.
Michael stared at me, mouth slightly open, his hands trembling around the phone.
“You did this,” he said. His voice was barely steady. “You and him.”
I tilted my head. “We helped.” I straightened in my chair. “Now. Your children.”
His hand tightened around the receiver until his knuckles went white.
“Liam is doing very well.” I let that settle for a moment. “Velaré just broke the top five. Fourth, actually. Fourth in the entire city. Not bad for a company everyone swore was going to collapse, right?”
He said nothing. He didn’t have to. His face was doing plenty of talking for him.
“And Cassandra…”
I paused.
“She goes by Sandra now.” I let her new name sit between us, rolling my tongue around it with slow ease. I tilted my head, watching his face contort. It was such a small thing, really. Just a name. Except it wasn’t, not to her. It was a reclamation.
“She’s doing so much better now. She’s getting the help she needs, and Liam says she looks happy.”
I smiled faintly.
“Actually happy.”
Michael’s expression tightened.
“They have a real relationship now. The kind you never thought they’d have. And guess what?”
His eyes lifted to mine.
“She hasn’t asked about Cassian in months.”
When she first started getting help, she still asked. Is he okay? Does he hate me? Will he ever forgive me? But as the weeks went by, she asked a little less. Then a little less again.
And eventually, she stopped asking altogether.
Instead, she started talking about other things—books she’d been reading, music she’d discovered, a painting class she was considering taking.
Normal things. Things that had nothing to do with him. Things that proved, more than anything else, that she had finally, truly let go.
She’d started becoming someone her father wouldn’t recognize.
Michael was glaring at me across the glass. His jaw had gone rigid, his face pallid, his breathing shallow, every inch of him pulled taut as though sheer force of will might keep the rest of his carefully dismantled world from caving in around him. His eyes were dark with uncontained fury.
I smiled.
Wide. Bright.
“You hate this, don’t you?”
I leaned forward and rested my chin on my hand. “This is so fun.”
His eyes stayed fixed on mine.
I let the silence stretch.
Then, because apparently I had not yet reached my quota for ruining his day, I smiled again.
“Cassian and I are doing amazing, by the way.”
We were.
He’d moved into my apartment the week after I got my memories back.
He said the house felt too sad—too many empty rooms, too many nights spent alone, too many ghosts lodged in its corners—and the apartment was smaller, warmer, filled to the brim with the life we were building together. He fit there. We fit there.
It wasn’t meant to be a permanent plan. We’d already started looking at houses, spending our weekends driving through neighborhoods we’d never visited before, wandering through empty rooms that didn’t belong to anyone yet. Imagining what they might become once they belonged to us.
We weren’t particularly picky about the house itself.
It just needed space. Space for a garden.
A big one.
My husband was becoming a professional. He had opinions about soil now. Strong ones. He talked about composting with the same intensity some people reserved for football, sent me articles about companion planting, and woke up early on Saturdays to tend to the tomatoes. Our tomatoes.
I watched Michael’s face. Watched as he processed it all.
Watched as the truth settled into him, piece by piece.
That his children were thriving without him, that the empire he had spent his entire life building was gone, that the son he had dismissed and the daughter he had used had somehow found their way back to each other after all these years.
His teeth clenched. I could see the muscles working along his jaw, the effort it took to keep his voice from shaking.
“You might think all of this will last forever, but it won’t. You’re ruinous. You don’t deserve—”
I sighed.
“Oh, Michael.” I leaned closer to the glass, taking in the way his eyes flickered, the way his hands gripped the edge of the table.
“It must be so hard. Leading a terrible life. Being so alone that you have to make up stories to make yourself feel better.” I tapped the glass with my finger, once, twice.
“I hope things never get better for you.”
Then I smiled.
“Gotta go now, Baylee. My husband is waiting.”
His mouth opened.
Something sharp was coming. Something desperate, probably meant to hurt me. But I had already hung up the receiver.
I didn’t wait to hear it.
I didn’t need to.
Outside, Cassian was leaning against the car, his arms and ankles crossed, the picture of patience. His face shifted when he saw me. His shoulders relaxed. A familiar light appeared in his eyes. When I reached him, he pushed off the car and opened his mouth.