Chapter 19 - The Encounter on LaSalleAn hour later, I walked out of the heavy brass doors of the courthouse into the bright afternoon sunlight.

The air smelled of warm asphalt and rain. Darcy was beside me, chatting on her headset with her office manager about finalizing the post-conviction paperwork.

As we reached the sidewalk, a figure stepped out from behind a concrete pillar.

It was Fiona.

She looked broken. Her coat was misbuttoned, her eyes swollen and bloodshot, her aristocratic posture entirely gone. She stood in front of us, blocking the path to our car.

"Are you happy now?" Fiona asked, her voice raspy, barely above a whisper. "He's going to prison. My son... my beautiful boy... is going to prison."

Darcy immediately stepped forward, reaching into her jacket for her phone. "Mrs. Cole, step away immediately or I am calling the officers inside to cite you for harassment."

"No, Darcy," I said softly, touching my attorney’s arm. "It’s fine."

I stepped around Darcy and stood three feet away from my former mother-in-law.

"Julian isn't going to prison because of me, Fiona," I said gently, without a trace of anger in my voice. "Julian is going to prison because you raised him to believe that other people existed only to serve his ego. You taught him that money was something to take, that women were something to control, and that reality could be rewritten if you yelled loud enough."

Fiona trembled, her mouth opening and closing like a fish out of water. "I... I gave him everything..."

"No," I said, stepping closer. "You gave him an illusion. And when I stopped paying for that illusion, it collapsed."

I looked down at her hands—the hands that had tapped impatiently on my quartz counter while demanding sixty dishes.

"You spent your whole life demanding tribute from everyone around you, Fiona," I told her quietly. "Now, you have no home, no money, and no son to fight your battles. You forced me into a dark room... but you’re the one who ended up locked inside."

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Fiona stared at me, her eyes wide with a realization so profound and devastating that she couldn't formulate a single word.

I stepped past her, my heels clicking firmly against the concrete, and got into the waiting car.