He got nothing.
He was always going to get nothing. That’s the thing about building your future on someone’s death — even when it “works,” you’ve traded everything that made a future worth having.
The forged loans were untangled, slowly, painfully, with lawyers.
My father’s prenup — the one Christopher had resented for fourteen years — protected my inheritance completely. The house was mine. The company my father left me was mine. Christopher’s debts were Christopher’s, and they followed him into a cell.
I kept the house.
People asked how I could — how I could sleep in the bedroom he’d come into, live in the rooms where it happened.
But my father built that house. I restored it with my own hands, alongside him, before Christopher was ever in my life. The safe room I hid in was something I made, a piece of my own foresight that saved me.
Christopher was a fourteen-year detour in a house that was mine before him and remained mine after.
