CHAPTER 126: What We Lost

POV: Avalon Pierce

They sat at the kitchen table with a blank document open between them, the cursor blinking, neither of them writing anything yet.

“I don’t know where to start,” Selene said.

“Start with what’s true,” Avalon said. “Not what sounds right.”

She nodded slowly, then began typing.

My name is Selene Castellano Pierce. Thirty years ago, a man decided that protecting his own interests mattered more than a young father’s life. I never met Jonathan Pierce. But I married his son, and I have spent the last year learning what his absence cost this family.

She looked at Avalon.

“Your turn,” she said.

He took the laptop.

My father died when I was eight years old. I grew up believing it was an accident. I built walls around that loss because grief without explanation has nowhere to go. This year, I learned the truth— he died because he refused to look away from something wrong, and that my grandmother spent thirty years protecting me from a danger she couldn’t eliminate but only delay.

He stopped typing. Looked at Selene.

“Is that too much,” he said.

“It’s not enough yet,” she said gently. “Keep going.”

They wrote for two hours, trading the laptop back and forth, each adding what the other couldn’t quite say alone.

Gerald Whitmore is dead now, Selene wrote eventually. He died before facing the people he hurt. But David Reeves stood in his place, willing to kill again to protect the same silence. That silence has cost this family two generations of grief.

We are not asking for sympathy, Avalon added. We are asking the court to understand that corruption like this doesn’t end with one man’s death. It requires people willing to keep speaking, keep building, keep refusing to look away—the way my father did, the way my grandmother eventually did, the way we are trying to now.

Selene read it over his shoulder.

“That’s good,” she said quietly. “That’s exactly right.”

When they finished, it was past midnight.

Selene leaned back in her chair, exhausted.

“We should add something about the foundation,” she said. “About what we’re building because of this, not despite it.”

Avalon nodded, took the laptop one more time.

Out of this loss, we have built something. A foundation that asks a simple question: what are we actually building toward? We believe the answer matters more than the grief that prompted the asking. We believe Jonathan Pierce, and Robert Laine, and everyone Reeves silenced along the way, deserved better than silence. We are trying to give that to the people who come after them.

He closed the laptop.

“Done,” he said.

Selene reached over and took his hand.

“Thank you,” she said. “For writing this with me instead of for me.”

“I learned that the hard way,” he said. “But I learned it.”

The next morning, they submitted it to the federal prosecutor’s office together, standing in the lobby of the courthouse, the same building where depositions had once threatened to tear them apart, now holding something they’d built together instead.

Margaret called as they walked out.

“Reeves accepted the plea deal,” she said. “Life without parole, in exchange for full cooperation. He gave up everyone—the corrupt board members, three additional names connected to the old network, even details about Henderson’s unrelated business dealings that the SEC is now investigating separately.”

“It’s actually over,” Selene said.

“It’s actually over,” Margaret confirmed.

That evening, Selene sat on the kitchen floor again—not from exhaustion this time, just because it had become a place that felt honest—and Avalon sat down across from her.

“What now,” she said.

He looked at her for a long moment.

“Now we go to Maya’s wedding,” he said. “And we stop checking the news every morning. And we just live.”

Selene smiled, the first easy smile in weeks.

“I’d like that,” she said.