I turned off the light and let the darkness settle around me, quiet and complete. Somewhere in Illinois, prosecutors were still filing motions with names that once mattered to me. Somewhere else, Ryan Carter was probably telling a stranger in a bar that his ex-fiancée had ruined his life. Let him. Weak men always call consequences cruelty when they finally arrive.
In the morning, I would wake in my own house, review three new case files, answer Owen’s lemonade budget, and go to work with the city spread beneath me like a map of possible fraud waiting to be exposed.
And this time, when I came home, no one would be upstairs in my room mistaking my silence for surrender.