The version who built a life in LA. The version who fought to be taken seriously. The version who doesn't fall apart over old feelings and soft memories. But there's another version of me here.
She breathes differently. She laughs more easily. She sleeps better.
She feels like herself again.
And she is standing in the kitchen right now, watching Nate pour coffee like it's the most natural thing in the world. He looks calm. The same way he always has—like he belongs to this place in a way I think I outgrew.
"You've been quiet today," he says gently.
I nod. "Just thinking."
He studies me for a moment longer than necessary, like he knows there's more I'm not saying.
"About what?" he asks, setting a mug in front of me.
Instead, I say, "Can I ask you something?"
“You know you can just ask the question without prefacing it with a question, Len.”
"What really happened with Scott? Before he died. I know he went to prison, but..." I trail off, not sure exactly what I'm asking. Just knowing I need to understand.
Nate takes a sip of his coffee, and he considers how much to tell me. Then he sets the mug down gently.
"Jake had been collecting evidence," he says quietly. "For months before everything went down. Documents, recordings, financial records. He gave it all to a guy called Adrian Di Laurentis—who gave it to me months later, while I was still in rehab. Between what Jake collected and what Danny had already found, there was enough to put Scott away for twenty years, if not more.”
“What were the charges exactly?"
"Money laundering. Racketeering. Aiding and abetting in a homicide." His jaw tightens. "The warehouse fire that killed Jake. Scott orchestrated it all, but Monty went rogue and, well, you know the rest."
It resulted in Jake dying and Nate almost losing his life too.
"He killed his own son."
"The plan was to just scare Jake." Nate's voice is flat, but pain lives underneath. "But the plan went sideways because of Monty'spersonal vendetta with me. Monty's still serving time for his part in it. But Scott was diagnosed with cancer while he was in jail. Brain cancer. He died before he could serve out his full sentence."
He pauses, and darkness flickers across his face.
"Part of me is angry he didn't suffer more. That he got to die relatively quickly instead of rotting in prison for decades the way he deserved."
His hands tighten around his coffee mug.
"But apparently the brain cancer was its own kind of hell. Maybe that was karma doing its thing in a different way. I don't know."
The memory surfaces slowly—Mom calling me, her voice careful and measured.
Scott's dead.
The relief I'd felt, followed immediately by guilt for feeling relieved.
I'd already given my written statement to the police about the hit-and-run when I was seventeen. About how Scott had deliberately tried to run me down. About the terror of headlights coming straight at me and nowhere to go.
But there had been enough charges against him by then—Jake's death, the heroin Monty injected into Nate on Scott's orders, the years of abuse documented by hospitals and social workers.
My statement was just one more piece of evidence in a mountain that had already buried him.
Mom had called to tell me I wouldn't need to testify after all.
That it was over. All of it, just... over.
