Chapter 14
Three years passed.
Ethan was twelve.
Brooke was twenty.
Claire had moved the family to another house in the same school district.
Not Arizona.
Not a secret compound.
A normal two-story home with a fenced yard.
Ethan hated green paint.
For almost a year he refused anything in that color.
Then his soccer team changed uniforms.
Green.
Claire offered to speak to the coach.
Ethan said:
“No. Gary doesn’t own green.”
That became one of those small victories nobody outside therapy understood.
Brooke attended community college first, then transferred to Ohio State.
She studied criminal justice for one semester.
Then changed majors because everyone assumed the choice was about her family.
She hated that.
Eventually she chose architecture.
Dominic called from prison on schedule.
Ethan spoke almost every week.
He told his father about school.
Baseball.
Video games.
A girl he refused to describe.
Their relationship became limited but steady.
Brooke answered far less often.
Not to punish Dominic.
Because every call left her split in half.
One version of her father was the man who arrived at the door and refused to become violent when violence would have been easy.
The other was the man whose criminal world had shaped her childhood long before Gary entered it.
Claire never pressured her.
Neither did Ethan.
Dominic tried once.
“You don’t have to forgive everything to talk to me.”
Brooke answered:
“You don’t have to ask me to talk.”
He stopped asking.
Gary remained outside their lives.
That door was closed.
Claire never contacted him.
Ethan did not want therapeutic reunification.
Brooke laughed bitterly when a lawyer mentioned the possibility after Gary completed custody.
“No.”
The court never forced it.
The family had enough open wounds.
Nobody needed to invent another.
Then Dominic’s attorney contacted Brooke before her twenty-first birthday.
Her father wanted to transfer a legitimate property interest into an independent trust for both children.
No conditions.
No requirement to visit.
No letters attached.
Brooke asked:
“Is the money clean?”
The attorney answered:
“The asset has been reviewed through the restructuring process and is lawful.”
She accepted only after her own attorney confirmed it.
Then she wrote Dominic one sentence:
Thank you for doing it without making us owe you.
May you like
He kept that message.
It was more contact than he had received from her in eight months.
