Chapter 33 - The Baseball Bat
That weekend, I drove out to the suburbs to visit my father. His health had been declining slightly, a natural progression of age, but his mind was as sharp and fierce as ever.
We sat on his back porch, watching the sun dip below the horizon. The wooden baseball bat—the one he had gripped tightly on the night I discovered the affair, ready to defend me against the monster in my house—still rested in the corner of the porch, a silent sentinel.
"You look tired, Em," my dad noted, sipping his iced tea.
"We are closing a massive case next week," I explained. "Elena's husband hid over four million dollars in a decentralized crypto-wallet. It took us weeks to crack the encryption, but we finally got the ledger. We are going to blindside him in court on Tuesday."
My father smiled, a deep, resonant pride in his eyes. "You've become quite the executioner, haven't you?"
"I prefer the term 'auditor,'" I smirked.
I looked at the baseball bat, then down at the silver bracelet on my wrist. "Mark sent me a letter from prison this week. He was begging for money."
My dad's jaw tightened instantly. "Did you respond?"
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"I shredded it," I said simply. "But it made me think about the night everything fell apart. I remember feeling like the world was ending. Like I would never breathe again. Now, he's just a piece of trash paper in a machine, and I am running an empire."
My father reached over and patted my hand. "The world did end that night, Emma. The false world he built for you ended. But you survived the apocalypse, and you built a better world on top of the ashes. That’s what queens do."
