the line.
Then, her voice hardened, the artificial maternal
warmth completely evaporating. “After everything this family gave you, Peyton, you owe us mercy.”
Family
“You gave me nothing but twenty years of bitter contempt,” I said, my voice echoing off the hospital glass. “Grandpa gave me a real home, an education, and the courage to protect vulnerable people who cannot protect themselves. Mercy belongs exclusively to the victims. Justice belongs to you.”
I hung up the phone, cutting the line permanently.
The criminal trial lasted seven grueling weeks. The decrypted cloud archive successfully connected my family to eleven separate victims across the state—three of whom had tragically passed away under highly suspicious medical circumstances.
The corrupt physician took a plea deal to avoid the needle, testifying under oath that my parents had explicitly ordered him to make Franklin’s chemical termination appear completely natural.
The sentences were absolute:
My father received
twenty-eight years in a maximum-security facility.
Parenting
My mother was sentenced
to twenty-four years.
Wyatt, who had architected the shell companies and systematically destroyed financial evidence in the earlier cases, received thirty-six years without the possibility of parole.
At the final sentencing hearing, my father glared at me from the defense table, his fists cuffed to his belt. “You successfully destroyed this family, Peyton.”
Parenting
Franklin stood right beside me, leaning heavily on a polished wooden cane, thinner than before but standing completely upright.
“No, Dad,” I said, looking back at him one last time. “I simply stopped you from destroying another human being.”
Six months later, after the fraudulent corporate transfers were legally voided and the estate was cleared, Franklin and I returned to the Ridgecrest property. We brought in a construction crew and personally watched the excavator crush the backyard shed into splinters.
In its exact place, we
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