Reborn With A Survival Space
He'd chosen litigation over preparation, pride over survival, and the world he'd once dismissed as paranoid fantasy had answered him with the only verdict it had left to give.
Julian, for his part, spent the first three days in the compound in near silence, watching his mother accept help from the woman he'd humiliated at an anniversary dinner that felt, now, like it belonged to someone else's life entirely. On the fourth day, he found Ivy alone in the greenhouse, checking the wheat stores that had grown from a single test batch into rows thick enough to feed the entire compound through winter.
"I don't understand," he said quietly. "How did you know. All of it. Before any of it happened."