“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.
