Chapter Thirty-Seven: The Letters and The Light (Thomas)

                                        

                                              

One Year Later,

It's strange how a year can pass without you noticing until you do. Until you're standing in the kitchen barefoot, pouring coffee for a woman who still makes your chest ache with how much you love her, and you realize you've somehow built something soft and solid out of what was once rubble.
The morning I got the call, thirty years for my father, ten for Laura, something inside me exhaled for the first time in what felt like years. Charges of fraud, conspiracy, corporate corruption... it was all real now, official. The damage had been done, but justice had landed. I didn't celebrate, not exactly but I did close my eyes and breathe, long and steady, like someone finally released from a weight they didn't realize they were still carrying.
The company, surprisingly, had survived. Thanks to interim restructuring, external audits, and a few loyal board members who stepped in when everything came crashing down, we'd managed to stabilize operations. There was talk of "good faith receivership," and though the brand took a hit, the core business remained intact. Once it became clear that the crimes were isolated to my father and Laura, not systemic, were able to present a recovery plan and retain most of our investors.
Any profit that comes from it now goes directly to October and the kids. She didn't ask for it, never expected it, but it felt right. They deserved something clean, something reparative, even if the past couldn't be rewritten. I never want her to feel trapped in this marriage again because of money, never again.
As for me, I built something different. I focused on the shelter. On making something from the ground up that felt honest, that gave back. That place became my second home, my reminder that healing isn't abstract, it's concrete, visible, daily. Most days, when I'm not at the shelter, I'm at home with October, with the kids. That's the center of my life now. Not boardrooms or bottom lines. They're all gone now. My father. Laura. The chapter closed, filed away where it belongs.
Things with my mom were... different. Healing, slowly. October had said something, weeks after the sentencing, when I admitted I didn't know whether to let my mother back in.
"If you want her in your life, that's okay," she said gently, her thumb brushing the inside of my wrist.  "you're allowed to miss her you know?"
"I have you and the kids," I said.
She smiled. "And if there's room for more, that doesn't take away from us. I know your heart."
Maybe she did. Because now, once a month, I take my mom to lunch. We sit in some quiet place and talk about the girls, about Jimmy's teenage mood swings, about her therapist, her regrets. She's not perfect. But she's trying. She's always been a good grandma, and she's beginning to be more than that. It's cautious but it's real.
The nights are my favorite.
Lola's asleep on her stomach with her butt in the air like a tiny mountain. Alice insists she's too old for lullabies now, but still hums along when October sings in the hallway. Jimmy, taller than ever, plugs in his phone and calls his Carissa.
We go to bed together now. Every night. Some evenings we read. Sometimes we just lie there, her head on my chest, my fingers in her hair. We talk about the kids, the perfume shop, the new dogs snoring at the foot of our bed, and sometimes, we say nothing at all. Just exist beside each other.
Sex... hasn't happened. Not in the way it used to. But closeness, that we have. That we've rebuilt in quiet, patient steps. Nights where her body curled around mine, skin to skin beneath the sheets, her breath steady against my collarbone. Mornings where she'd linger in my arms, half-asleep, fingers tracing lazy lines along my ribs. There's still desire. Still the pull but it's different now, slower, deeper, waiting for safety to settle.