Chapter 10 - The New Beginning
Five years later.
Liam was six years old. In first grade. Obsessed with dinosaurs and space and teaching our three-legged rescue dog, Rocket, how to do tricks. He was smart — too smart, his teacher said, already reading at a fourth-grade level. He was kind. The kind of kid who shared his lunch with the boy who didn’t have any, who stood up for the smaller kids when the bullies picked on them, who came home every day with a new story about how he was going to “save the world” when he grew up.
I was thirty-seven now. The foundation had grown beyond my wildest dreams. We had offices in twelve cities. We’d helped over fifty thousand women escape abusive relationships. We’d returned over three hundred million dollars in stolen pension funds to the families who’d lost them. Our youth programs had reached a quarter of a million at-risk kids, giving them scholarships, mentors, and hope for a future that didn’t involve repeating the mistakes of their past.
Vanessa was now the foundation’s Chief Operating Officer. She’d gotten her master’s in social work, married that elementary school teacher, and had two little girls of her own — Liam’s best friends in the whole world. She was on the cover of Time magazine the year before, named one of the hundred most influential people in the world for her work with youth.
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Lila was the foundation’s Chief Program Officer. She’d never gone back to her old job. She’d met a wonderful woman — a pediatrician who worked at the free clinic we ran — and they’d gotten married two years ago, adopting a little girl from the foster system. We were raising our kids together, in the big farmhouse, four adults and four kids and three dogs, chaos and love and noise every single day.
Marisol was still my lawyer — and my best friend. She’d argued before the Supreme Court two years before, winning a landmark case that expanded protections
