“I’m sorry, Mom,” he murmured into my hair. “It was the only way to catch them clean.”
Amanda went white to the lips.
“We… we saw your body,” she stammered. “The casket. The funeral. You can’t… this is…”
“Did you?” Richard asked, turning to her, his voice suddenly the voice that had negotiated billion-dollar deals. “Or did you see what a cooperating medical examiner needed you to see?”
Julian’s hand twitched toward his pocket. Roberts was on him before the thought fully formed, his grip professional and unhurried.
A gun clattered onto the flagstones. Roberts kicked it aside.
“I wouldn’t,” he said calmly. “The property is surrounded by federal agents. This conversation is being recorded.”
An older man in a plain suit stepped into the garden through the gate Amanda had so confidently used moments earlier.
The air shifted to make room for him, the way rooms do around people whose job is to end illusions.
“Agent Donovan,” Richard said. “Lead on my case.”
“You faked your death to frame us,” Amanda spat, scrambling for outrage now that panic wasn’t working.
“We documented your crimes to convict you,” Donovan replied.
His voice had the scraped-clean patience of someone who had heard every excuse twice.
“The speed with which you moved to liquidate assets, the offshore transfers, the property listings, none of it reads like grief.”
He nodded once. Agents materialized from hedges and fog, windbreakers emerging from sea grass.
A voice read rights in a cadence that made my knees want to sit again.
The Arrests
Julian tried to protest, but it came out thin. Amanda attempted tears, they refused to cooperate.
When the agents cuffed her, she looked smaller, suddenly, like a woman who had dressed herself in other people’s power for so long she’d forgotten how little of it was actually hers.
As they led them away, she twisted to look back at me.
“You think you’ve won, you bitter old woman?” she hissed. “You’re nothing without his money. You never were.”
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