Chapter 7
The trial was set for January.
I spent the months between the hearing and the trial working.
Running the foundation.
Learning the ins and outs of my father’s construction company.
I hired a new CEO, a woman my father had always spoken highly of, smart and honest, and we started cleaning up the mess Grant had left behind.
We recovered most of the money he’d stolen.
We fixed the projects he’d cut corners on.
We made sure the company was stronger than it had been in years.
I started seeing a therapist.
Not because I was broken.
Because I wanted to heal.
I talked about my father.
About Grant.
About the anger, the grief, the fear I’d carried for so long.
She taught me that my strength wasn’t in never feeling hurt.
It was in feeling hurt and keeping going anyway.
I made new friends.
Old friends from college, people from the foundation, people who didn’t know about Grant, who didn’t look at me like I was a victim.
We went to dinner, to movies, to art galleries.
I laughed more than I had in years.
I started to remember what it felt like to be happy.
Becca kept her promise.
She stayed out of my life.
I heard through Mr. Blackwood that she’d moved to another state, gotten a new job, started over.
I didn’t wish her ill.
I didn’t wish her well.
I just didn’t think about her at all.
Grant’s lawyer tried one last time to make a deal a week before the trial.
Said he’d plead guilty to all charges, accept a ten-year sentence, if we agreed not to pursue civil damages.
I thought about it for a day.
Then I told Mr. Blackwood to say yes.
I didn’t need his money.
I had enough of my own.
What I needed was for it to be over.
For him to be gone.
The guilty plea was entered in court two days later.
I didn’t go.
I didn’t need to see him again.
Mr. Blackwood called me after the hearing.
“Ten years,” he said.
“No parole for at least seven. He’ll be in his fifties when he gets out. And he’ll never be able to work in this industry again. It’s over, Natalie.”
I hung up the phone.
I stood in the middle of my father’s office, the office that was now mine, and I cried.
Not sad tears.
Relieved tears.
Happy tears.
It was really over.
That night, I took the Versace dress out of the closet.
I ran my hand over the crystals, over the soft fabric.
I put it on.
It fit perfectly.
I looked in the mirror.
I didn’t see the woman who’d stood in that cathedral, broken and humiliated.
I saw a woman who was strong.
Who was brave.
Who had survived the worst thing that had ever happened to her and come out the other side better.
My father was right.
Elegance was armor.
But I didn’t need it to protect me anymore.
I was my own armor now.
The divorce was finalized a month later.
The judge signed the papers, and I was Natalie Hale again.
No more Carter.
No more Grant.
Just me.
I moved back into my father’s house.
Aunt Helen moved in with me, at least for a while.
We repainted the walls.
We bought new furniture.
We turned Grant’s old office into a playroom for the foundation’s kids, filled with books and toys and art supplies.
The house didn’t feel like a place of grief anymore.
It felt like home.
I threw a party in February.
A small one, for close friends and family, to celebrate the foundation’s new school opening.
I wore the Versace dress.
Aunt Helen wore a bright red dress that made her look twenty years younger.
The kids from the foundation came, running through the house, laughing, eating too much cake.
I stood in the backyard, watching them, and I felt my father’s presence there, warm and soft, like he was standing right beside me.
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“Thank you,” I whispered, to the sky, to him, to wherever he was.
“I’m okay. I’m really okay.”
