But force? They find none.
The money moved under her login. From her terminal. During hours when the logs show her alone in her office, her credentials active, her keystrokes recorded. No threats in writing. No recordings of demands. Nothing to prove that saying no would have cost her anything except maybe me walking out of her life.
The judge calls it federal wire fraud and embezzlement. Two counts. Guilty on both.
Briana gets prison. A term. Real years she will never get back. She will sit in a cell. She will wear a uniform. She will eat when they tell her to eat and sleep when they tell her to sleep.
Mandatory restitution. Numbers on a page she will never pay off. A debt that will cling to her long after she walks free.
A permanent, public conviction. Her name in databases. Her face in photographs. Her future reduced to a background check question:Have you ever been convicted of a felony?
She loses more than her job. She loses everything she had stolen for. Everything she betrayed for. The glittering future she had imagined while she moved money in the dark and told herself it would be worth it.
I watch her face when the verdict comes back. Her skin turns grey. Her mouth falls open, then closes again. Her fingers curlaround the edge of the defense table, and I can see the white of her knuckles from three rows away. Stark, bloodless knobs of bone poking through the skin. She looks like she’s trying to hold onto the world, but the world has already finished with her.
Of course she ended up like this. I suddenly remember her telling me once, early on, back when I still thought she was worth listening to; something about being raised by no one. It makes sense. She never had anyone to straighten the wild, twisted parts of her character out. No parents, no family, no history worth mentioning. People from that kind of background always think they’re owed something. They walk through life with their palms out, expecting the world to fill the holes their mothers left behind, expecting the world to compensate them for a childhood spent in shadows. Only to act surprised when the bill comes due.
It was only a matter of time.
Watching her, I don’t feel pity. I feel the urge to go home and scrub my skin until it’s raw and pink, to peel away every layer of myself that ever touched her, that ever wanted to be touched by her. She is a criminal. A low-level human being. A dirty contagion. I feel my lips curling at that thought, an expression stuck between the repulsion of the fact that I ever could have desired her, and the satisfaction that she got what she deserved.
After the bailiff leads her out, my father gathers his stiff grey coat and walks past me without a word. He doesn’t look at me. He doesn’t slow down. The exit door swings shut behind him, and the sound echoes off the high ceiling and fades into nothing.
He paid the lawyers. He managed the fallout. But he doesn’t spare me a glance.
I spot him in the courthouse parking lot, hand on the car door. His chauffeur holds it open. He climbs inside and never glances back.
At the few family gatherings I still get invited to, he won’t meet my eyes. His gaze slides past me, over me, around me. He talks to my mother, to my aunts, to anyone else at the table. Not to me. He speaks of the weather and the markets, his dry and weary voice carefully avoiding the vacuum where I am sitting. I am the elephant in the room.
The weekly dinners disappear. So do the casual calls. To him, I’ve already vanished.
I tell myself this is temporary. Once the dust settles, once the headlines are replaced by newer, fresher scandals, he’ll remember I’m his son. People forget. They move on.
They don’t.
My name drifts through HR backchannels. Shows up in legal compliance briefings. Probably becomes the kind of warning people exchange over coffee, off the record.
Did you hear about Julian Ashworth?
The embezzlement thing?
Yeah. Stay away from that one.
I am twenty-eight years old and my name is already a cautionary tale.
I send out applications anyway.
The first interviews go well. I still have the face of a man who belongs in a high-rise, walks in polished boots. The kind of handsome, trustworthy bone structure that suggests I’m good with things like spreadsheets and data. Until they reach the background check. Until the formal smiles tighten at the edges. Until I hear the phrase, “We’ll be in touch,” and know it’s the last time I’ll hear from them.
Some don’t bother with the song and dance.
“We’re pursuing a different candidate profile.”
“Our corporate culture requires alignment with professional integrity.”
“This position demands an unimpeachable background.”
Unimpeachable. The word follows me out of every conference room, every video call, every hopeful conversation that collapses the moment they Google my name.
