“No. He wasn’t part of this. He had no idea. He just paid the bills and bailed him out of trouble when he got in over his head. From what I can tell, all Jeremy wanted was to save him.”
“That’s why I fell in love with him in the first place. Jeremy was a bleeding heart. He wanted to save the world, one stray at a time,” Marianne offered as she took a trip down memory lane, her features softening.
“That was the problem. He wanted to save everyone. He forgot about us,” Kellie grumbled miserably. “Until he wanted money.”
“He’s not going to contest the will anymore.”
“What do you mean?”
“I spoke to him this morning. And he’s going to find another way. He never wanted Cassidy’s money for himself. He just couldn’t see any other way out.”
“So he was going to take his dead daughter's money? A daughter he abandoned. He was prepared to take the only thing left of her to save the son who destroyed our family.” Kellie was livid and deservedly so.
“He apologized and he’s not going to contest. He doesn’t want a cent,” I offered.
“Can we… can we give him some?”
“Mom!”
“Not all of it. Just enough to cover the debts. We’ve been through enough, no one else needs suffer,” Marianne offered, surprising us all.
“Marianne, you can do whatever you want. Cassidy left it all to you,” I reminded her, swallowing down the lump in my throat. This woman was amazing. She’d had her world destroyed. She’d buried her daughter. She’d found out the husband she once loved was responsible for enabling the man who destroyed her family and then took her daughter, and she was still thinking of others.
“So what happens now?” Kellie asked as she wiped her eyes and reached for her daughter.
“Now?
“Yeah. What do we do now?”
Skye moved beside me, wrapping her arms around my waist and looking up at me with sad, hope-filled eyes before finishing, “Now we let go.”
The End!
EPILOGUE
SKYE
It’d beentwelve months today since we’d farewelled Cassidy Knight.
For a long time we’d been so caught up with finding out when and why and how that we’d forgotten to live.
We’d ridden the rollercoaster of emotions but in the end, somehow, we were all still standing and moving forward. But it was more than that. Everyone was thriving. I missed Cassidy every day but I knew her and I loved her and I knew without a doubt she’d want us all happy.
True to his word, Jeremy had dropped any claim to her estate and the whole amount was released to Marianne. It was almost comical in a way. Marianne claimed Jeremy was the bleeding heart of the family, but the day the money hit her account, Marianne paid off his debts and gave him back his freedom. Jeremy hadn’t been a bad guy, in a way he’d been hurt just as much as the rest of us.
Kellie and baby Cassie were thriving. They were still living in Texas with Marianne but Kellie was starting to find her feet. She’d applied for a job at the local childhood center and was excited to start in a couple of weeks.
I’d found a job in Chicago as an executive assistant to a CEO in a marketing business. He was a hard-ass and most days we ended up arguing more than we did talking to each other, making all the other employees around us feel uneasy but so far, we hadn’t killed each other. Not yet anyway. It was a job I loved in a city that was starting to feel like home.
Home.
Hayden was a big part of that.
After we’d returned from Texas, it’d taken him a couple of weeks to come to terms with everything that'd happened. I suspected he knew more than he shared but I trusted him. If I needed to know, Hayden would’ve told me.
Marianne had visited last week, something I hadn’t been expecting. After dinner, we’d taken her to the same diner where Hayden and Cassidy had first met. Hayden had worried that it would be hard for me, that it was wrong, but it was perfect. I felt like we’d come full circle.
I finished packing up my desk, grabbed my bag and let Hayden know I was on my way.
