Reclaiming it was almost simple.
A man convicted of killing his first wife and framing his second does not keep control of a five-billion-dollar company, or a Hamptons estate, or anything else.
Roman will answer for Marissa Thorne, and for my father, for the rest of his life.
Priscilla, who couldn’t resist bragging, is answering as his accessory.
Sienna took her emeralds — my emeralds — and tried to vanish before the accounts froze. She did not make it far, and the jewelry went back into my father’s safe where it belonged.
I put Edmund Langley’s portrait back on the wall the first afternoon I came home.
I stood in front of it for a long time.
“Nobody is coming to rescue you, Isabel,” my husband had whispered, so sure of himself.
He was right. Nobody came.
I didn’t need them to.
My father spent twenty years teaching me how to read the truth hidden inside a column of numbers, how to wait, how to never let anyone see my hand before I was ready to play it.
He gave me the only weapon that ever mattered, and he gave it to me so long ago that Roman never knew it was in the room.
I run Langley Holdings now, the way my father ran it — integrity over zeros, every single time.
I used part of it to do the one thing I couldn’t stop thinking about in that cell: I made sure Marissa Thorne’s family finally got to bring her home, and to bury her with her name cleared and the truth on the record.
She found something she shouldn’t have, and it cost her five years in the dark and a story that called her a woman who ran away.
