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For a moment, I couldn't speak. “You'd do that?”

“Yes.” Her voice softened. “And not because you owe the firm anything. You don't. Philip is the one who made these choices. But we can do something useful now. We can make sure the legal mess he created doesn't hurt you or the children any more than it already has.”

Something about hearing it from her made me look down at my hands. She was right. We were victims every bit as much as those he’d scammed money from. I'd never thought of myself that way. I'd thought of myself as the husband who had been betrayed, the father trying to keep three children safe, and the man whose house, finances, marriage, and future had been torn apart. But Felicity was right. I was a victim, too.

“I don't know what to say.”

“You don't have to say anything,” she told me. “Just let me help.”

There was no pity in her voice. There was compassion, certainly, and there was anger on my behalf, but there was also the calm determination of someone who had already decided what she was going to do. She had seen the children that day, she knew what Philip had done, and she knew that the firm's own reputation was tangled up in the fallout. Whatever the mixture of professional responsibility and personal sympathy behind her offer, I couldn't deny that I needed the help.

Within days, Felicity was handling my divorce and the legal work surrounding the children. Philip didn't fight the divorce. He didn't fight my request for sole custody of Evan and Matt, either. After signing the divorce paperwork, he wrote a separate letter to the court asking that I be given sole legal and physical custody and that his own parental rights be terminated. He handed the letter to Felicity himself and asked her to make sure the court received it.

Felicity told me about it with a look that suggested she had not particularly enjoyed being handed one more piece of Philip's emotional debris.

“He gave this to me and asked me to make sure the judge gets it,” she said, setting the folded letter on the desk between us. “I'm going to do that, because if he wants to make this request formally, it needs to be before the court. But I want you to understand something, Darren. His letter doesn't undo anything. It doesn't excuse what he did. It simply tells the court what he wants now.”

I nodded, but my hands were already shaking as I reached for it.

Philip wrote that he was facing a lengthy prison sentence and believed the children needed stability with the parent who had been caring for them. He asked that I be awarded sole legal and physical custody and that his parental rights be terminated. Reading it hurt more than I expected because it was the first thing Philip had done since his arrest that felt entirely focused on the children and me rather than himself.

The court granted me sole custody and terminated Philip's parental rights immediately.

There was a handwritten note attached to the paperwork. I almost didn't read it, but eventually I unfolded it and did.

I'm sorry. You were all the best things to ever happen to me, and I fucked up. Please take care of them and know I really do and always will love you all.

I stared at it until the words blurred. For one horrible second, anger burned through me so fiercely that I wanted to tear the paper in half.

You don't get to say that.

You didn't get to destroy a family and then tell me we were the best things that had ever happened to you. You didn't get to steal our money and build another home. You didn't get to cheat on me. You didn't get to lie to me about our children. You didn't get to spend years making choices that could destroy all of us and then leave me with a piece of paper telling me that you loved us.

I crumpled the note in my hand, and then I started crying because the worst part was that I believed him. I believed that he loved the children. I believed he loved me in some way that only made sense to him. That was what made everything so damn hard. If he'd never loved us, maybe it would have been easier to hate him. Instead, I was left with the awful knowledge that a person could love you and still hurt you beyond anything you could imagine and that you had to walk away in order to survive them.

I smoothed the paper back out and put it with the rest of the documents. I couldn't bring myself to throw it away, but I couldn't keep looking at it, either, so when I got home, I put it in the drawer under my socks.

Except it wasn't really my home anymore. It was my parents.

Our house and cars were being taken to satisfy the government's claims against the money Philip had stolen, and the rest of our accounts were frozen while the investigators and financial authorities sorted through everything. My salary had been returned to me because it was legitimate income that had nothing to do with him or the case, but I couldn't use the old account to receive it anymore. Felicity helped me get the paperwork sorted out, and I had to open a completely separate account so my employer at the real estate law firm could pay me without the money getting caught up in Philip's mess.

It was surreal seeing my own paycheck treated like something that needed to be rescued from my husband's crimes. My salary was mine. I'd earned it. But for a while, even getting access to that felt like another legal problem I had to solve.

The financial damage was enormous. There were tax consequences, debts, legal expenses, and whatever else the investigators uncovered that I hadn't even begun to understand. Philip hadn't just stolen money from the firm. He'd apparently managed to create a financial disaster large enough to reach into every corner of our lives.

My parents helped wherever they could. They never made me ask. They bought groceries, helped with the children, and gave us somewhere to stay. They did everything loving parents were supposed to do, but I hated the pity. I knew they couldn't help it, and I knew they weren't judging me, but every time my mother looked at me with those worried eyes or felt my father’s gaze on me, and he looked away, his mouth tight, I felt something inside me tighten. So much of our lives had disappeared, and the strangest part was realizing how normal everything had seemed while it was happening.

I'd gone on vacation. I'd taken the boys to Disney Paris. I'd been busy bringing Laura home and learning how to care for a newborn with different idiosyncrasies than her brothers had had. I'd been buying diapers, making bottles, helping with homework, taking Skye to the vet, worrying about Christmas presents, getting the boys to school and back, and simply trying to keep three children happy while working from home as a paralegal.

All that time, investigators had been digging into Philip's life. They'd been following the money, piecing together everything he'd done, while I hadn't known a thing. Neither had our friends. Neither had his parents or mine, nor Gigi. As far as I knew, the only people who had known something was wrong were the people investigating him and the people at the firm who had eventually realized money was missing and set everything in motion. Absolutely everyone else had been living in the same illusion I had. Except, of course, George.

I sat in my parents' living room one evening while the children were upstairs getting ready for bed. My father and mother were watching some police drama on television, complete with flashing lights, someone shouting about a suspect, and music that was supposed to make everything feel urgent. I wasn't watching. I sat on the sofa with my hands clasped between my knees and stared at the television without actually seeing it.

I had sole custody of my children. The thought still felt strange. I was their father. I'd always been their father. But now there was no other parent coming home, no one to share the decisions with, and no one to call when Evan had a fever, Matt scraped his knee, or Laura wouldn't stop crying. It was all me, and somehow, despite everything, that didn't frighten me as much as it should have.

The children needed me. That part had always been simple. What wasn't simple was figuring out where we were going to live.

My parents had made it clear we could stay with them for as long as we needed, but I didn't want that forever. Not because I didn't love them. I did. I just needed something that belonged to us, a home that didn't belong to Philip, where I wouldn't walk into the kitchen and remember the coffee I'd left sitting there while his lawyer explained that my husband had another home, and where the children could have bedrooms that didn't carry the weight of everything we'd lost. I'd already started looking, but there was one thing I had to finish first - Laura.