Most of it, ugly.
Some of it, unbearable.
But some of it…good.
The investigation surrounding Ashford exploded after William’s arrest. Storage units were uncovered across three states under different aliases, each one packed with enough evidence to keep entire FBI teams working around the clock. Financial records. Burner phones. Transaction logs.
Cardboard boxes lined carefully with plastic, each one holding pieces of stolen lives.
They’d found Abel’s shoes in one of them.
I was beside my mother when Agent Chen unzipped the evidence bag.
Black with red soles, the fabric worn pale around the toes where he used to drag his feet against the pavement. The laces were tied unevenly tight because Abel never learned how to loosen them properly before taking them off, so he’d just force his feet in and out until the heels bent inward.
And there, barely hanging onto the rubber near the side seam, was the faded corner of a Superman sticker he’d stuck on them himself because he’d been obsessed with superheroes that year.
My mother made this sound when she saw them—just this crushed, broken noise like her body had forgotten how to hold itself upright around that amount of pain.
That moment would never leave me, and I worried it would destroy Mom permanently.
It didn’t.
Instead, it seemed to carve something open inside her that finally allowed the grief to breathe instead.
It wasn’t closure—people like us didn’t get closure.
Butcertainty.
And certainty changed things.
Otto confirmed what everyone had already started suspecting by then. Abel was gone long before the names, transactions, and storage units started piling high enough to make national news. No body was ever recovered, but the timeline matched too cleanly for anyone to keep pretending otherwise.
I think part of me knew before Agent Chen ever sat us down. Hope just makes people stupid sometimes. It keeps your chest open long after everything inside it should’ve learned better.
Even then, I still caught myself imagining him somewhere out there waiting to be found. Older now.Alive.
Henry helped arrange trauma counseling after everything came out. At first, my mother barely spoke during the sessions. She mostly cried and blamed herself and apologized to ghosts nobody blamed but her.
Then, before I really noticed, the house began changing. She started playing music again while she cooked dinner. The curtains stayed open during the day now, sunlight stretching across the floors instead of being shut out, and little by little, the house stopped feeling frozen in the exact moment Abel disappeared.
William Kellerman died two months after his arrest.
Officially, it was a cardiac event brought on by stress-related complications while awaiting federal transfer.
Unofficially—
“Well,” Henry had said mildly from across his kitchen island, lifting his coffee to his mouth, “that’s a shame.”
I stared at Henry over the edge of my own coffee cup. “Did you just mafia-villain your way through that sentence on purpose?”
One corner of his mouth lifted. “Archibald, I have no idea what you mean.
“Mmhm.” I narrowed my eyes. “Should I be concerned?”
Henry took another slow sip like we were discussing weather patterns instead of the sudden death of a child trafficker.
“Stress is very hard on the heart.”