“You used me!” Dylan shouted back, twisting against the cuffs. “My whole life. Every man you married. Every con. I was just your prop. You’re—”
“Enough,” Sarah cut in, her voice sharp. “Sophia Reed, you’re under arrest for conspiracy to commit murder, attempted murder, insurance fraud, and wire fraud. Dylan Reed, you’re under arrest for conspiracy to commit murder, attempted murder, and multiple counts of fraud.”
She read them their rights. I stopped listening halfway through.
I walked past them, past Victor now being loaded onto a stretcher, and out the front door.
The lawn was filled with flashing red and blue lights. Neighbors stood on their porches in hoodies and sweatpants, phones in hand, watching the scene unfold like a late-night crime show. The air smelled like wet grass and exhaust.
Sam found me standing at the edge of the lawn, looking back at the house I’d almost died in.
“You okay?” he asked.
“No,” I said. “But I’m alive.”
“Victor’s already talking,” Sam said. “He wants a deal. He’s confirming everything. Sophia hired him three months ago. Dylan approached him two weeks later with a different plan. Victor was going to take both payments, kill you, then claim Dylan attacked him and he had to kill Dylan in self-defense.”
Sam shook his head.
“He was going to betray both of them,” he said. “Three scorpions in a bottle.”
“What about Jennifer and Lisa?” I asked. “The other women.”
“Officers are with them now,” Sam said. “They’re safe. Shocked, but safe.”
On the driveway, officers walked Victor, Dylan, and Sophia to separate patrol cars in handcuffs.
Sophia saw me and tried to speak, but an officer guided her into the back seat. Dylan stared straight ahead. Victor glanced at me and gave me a crooked, almost apologetic smile.
“Nothing personal, old man,” he said. “Just business.”
For the first time that night, I felt anger cut through the numbness.
You almost made me another file in someone’s investigation, I thought. Another dead man whose family thought he’d just had a bad heart.
The trial took eight months.
Victor pleaded guilty quickly. Facing a mountain of evidence, he agreed to testify against both Sophia and Dylan in exchange for thirty years instead of life.
His testimony was damning. He laid out every detail—meetings with Sophia in Renton, phone calls with Dylan, the promised payments, the plan to kill me and stage the aftermath.
Dylan tried to claim diminished capacity, said his mother had manipulated him his entire life. The defense painted him as a broken kid, raised around schemes and lies, too damaged to know right from wrong.
But Sam’s investigation into Margaret Sullivan told a different story.
The prosecution showed the jury how Dylan had befriended Margaret, isolated her from her extended family, convinced her to change her will, then tampered with her car’s brakes. They showed texts to Jennifer Walsh and Lisa Freeman, messages filled with declarations of love and promises of marriage, juxtaposed against emails where Dylan asked insurance agents about payout timelines.
He was twenty-three years old by the time the trial started. He’d already crossed every line.
The jury deliberated less than a day. Dylan got life without the possibility of parole.
Sophia never testified. She sat through the entire trial in a tailored pantsuit, posture perfect, face carefully composed. Her lawyer argued that the evidence was circumstantial, that Victor had acted on his own, that the recordings were taken out of context.
But the jury heard the audio of her and Victor discussing “timelines” and “final payments.” They saw the bank records for the offshore accounts. They heard Dr. Cole testify about digoxin, explaining to twelve ordinary Washington jurors how a man in his early sixties could be slowly pushed toward “natural causes.”
When the verdict came back—guilty on all counts—Sophia’s mask finally cracked.
As the judge read “life without parole,” she turned her head and found me in the gallery. Our eyes met one last time.
Her eyes were empty. No apology. No remorse. Just cold calculation brought to a dead end.
A week after sentencing, Patricia Bennett called me.
“James,” she said, “can you come over? I found something. Something Will wanted you to have.”
I drove to the house in Bellevue where Will had spent his last months, where Patricia still lived among his books and sketches and half-finished projects. The rose bushes in the backyard were blooming; Will had planted them himself, hands in the dirt, talking about “retirement landscaping.”
Patricia met me in the garden, wearing a cardigan over a simple blouse, hair pulled back. She held a small envelope in her hand.
“He left two USB drives,” she said. “The lawyer had the first one. I had this.”
She handed me the envelope.
“He said, ‘If everything turns out okay, if James is safe, then give him this one,’” she said.
I took it home to my new house—smaller, quieter, without ghosts. My study there had fewer books, more light, and no secret vitamin bottles.
I plugged in the drive.
Will’s face appeared on screen again, but different this time. This was Will before the cancer got truly bad. Still thinner than I remembered from our company’s IPO party, but his eyes held something else.
Hope.
“Jim,” he said, smiling. “If Patricia gave you this, it means I was right and you’re safe. Thank God.”
He shifted in his chair.
“I recorded two videos,” he said. “The one you saw first was insurance. In case I was wrong about Sophia, you could destroy it and forget it ever happened.”
He took a breath.
“But if I was right,” he said, “I want you to hear something.”
He leaned forward, the old intensity returning.
“Forty-three years, brother,” he said. “We built Harrison Tech from nothing. Remember that apartment in Palo Alto? Ramen for dinner, sleeping on an air mattress, writing code until three in the morning. We changed the world a little, Jim. We really did.”
His eyes glistened.
“But that’s not what I’m proudest of,” he said. “I’m proud that in all those years, all those deals, all that money, we never stopped being brothers. You held my hand when my dad died. I held yours when Catherine passed. That’s what matters. Not the company. Not the money. Us.”
He wiped his eyes with the back of his hand.
“So here’s what I need you to do,” he said. “Don’t let what Sophia did define the rest of your life. Don’t let it make you bitter or make you hide. You’ve got good years left, Jim. Use them.”
He smiled.
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