Chapter 9 - The Foundation and the Family Business
Six months later, life was nothing like it had been before the wedding.
We used the money the government seized from Voss and the Harringtons—more than two hundred million dollars—to start the Carter Family Foundation. Mom ran it, of course. It provided free housing, healthcare, education, and job training to survivors of human trafficking and domestic violence, to single moms struggling to make ends meet, to kids who grew up the way I did, with a parent working three jobs just to keep food on the table. We opened community centers in Queens and Miami and a dozen other cities across the country, named after Maria’s husband, the man Voss had killed twenty years ago when he’d tried to expose the trafficking ring.
Anya ran the Miami community center. She’d gone back to school, gotten her degree in social work, and spent every day helping other girls who’d been through what she’d been through. Maria worked there too, teaching cooking classes, running the food bank, making sure everyone who walked through the door got a hot meal and a hug.
Mark retired from the FBI after twenty-five years, but he didn’t stop working. He ran security for the foundation, trained other agents how to go undercover, spent every night at home with Mom, making up for the twenty years he’d lost. They were like newlyweds, holding hands everywhere they went, bickering over who made better coffee, dancing in the kitchen to old jazz records late at night. I’d walk in and see them, and my heart would feel so full it hurt.
I started my own forensic accounting firm, Carter & Associates, right there in Queens. I didn’t move to a fancy penthouse in Manhattan—we kept our little two-bedroom apartment, the chipped blue paint, the fire escape where I’d sat going through Harrington files all those nights. My firm specialized in taking down corrupt billionaires, in exposing white-collar crime, in finding the hidden money no one else could find. I hired single moms, survivors of trafficking, people who’d been told their whole lives they weren’t “good enough” to work at the fancy Wall Street firms. We were the best in the country. Within a year, we had offices in five cities, a hundred employees, and a waiting list of clients begging us to take their cases.
I posted about our work on Facebook all the time—stories of the people we helped, tips for other women going through hard times, reminders that you don’t need a rich last name to change the world. One of my posts, a photo of Mom and Anya laughing at the Miami community center, got fifty million views. A video of me giving a speech to a group of high school girls in the Bronx, telling them “the boys who call you bossy now are gonna be working for you later,” got shared a million times. Strangers sent me letters every day, telling me my story had given them the courage to leave their abusive husbands, to go back to school, to start their own businesses.
It was everything I’d ever wanted, and more.
But there was one thing missing.
One night, about a year after the trial, I was sitting on the fire escape, drinking a beer, watching the sun set over the Queens skyline, when Mark came out and sat next to me, holding two slices of the pepperoni pizza we ordered every Friday.
“Something on your mind?” he said, handing me a slice.
I shrugged. “Just thinking. About the wedding. About how I thought marrying Blake was the worst thing that ever happened to me. But it led to all of this. To getting you back. To the foundation. To the firm. To everything.”
He nodded, smiling. “Funny how life works. The worst things sometimes turn out to be the best.”
He paused, then pulled a small envelope out of his pocket, handed it to me.
“This came for you today,” he said. “Registered mail. From the White House.”
I frowned, opening it. Inside was a handwritten letter from the President, inviting me to be a keynote speaker at the White House Summit on Women’s Economic Empowerment, and to join a new federal task force fighting white-collar crime and human trafficking. There was also a note at the bottom: Your mother’s work with the Carter Family Foundation has inspired millions of Americans. We would be honored if both of you would join us.
I stared at the letter, my eyes wet. A year ago, I was a girl about to marry a monster, my mom being humiliated in front of five hundred people, everyone thinking we were just poor, desperate charity cases. Now we were being invited to the White House, to help shape national policy, to change the country for the better.
I looked at Mark, smiling through my tears. “Mom’s gonna lose her mind when she sees this.”
He laughed. “She already did. I showed her an hour ago. She’s inside right now, trying on every dress she owns, yelling about how she needs to get her hair done before we go to Washington.”
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I stood up, leaning over the fire escape rail, looking at the city lights. The same city where I’d grown up, where Mom had scrubbed floors to put me through college, where Voss had once held a gun to her head, where Blake had tossed that hundred-dollar bill like it was trash.
That hundred-dollar bill. I still had it, framed now, hanging on the wall of our office, right next to a photo of Mom, Mark, Anya, Maria, and me, all laughing at the foundation’s first anniversary party. Under it, I’d put a plaque, with the words I’d said on the courthouse steps: Never let anyone make you feel small because of where you come from. Your greatest strength is the story they tried to erase.
