Chapter 11 - SIXTY-EIGHT DEGREES
I served eighteen months.
Credits for programs and good conduct reduced the rest.
No special Moretti arrangement.
No phone call from a judge.
No envelope under a table.
I checked because I had become paranoid about favors.
Kline found that insulting.
I found it necessary.
The morning I was released, Chicago was cold enough to make breathing hurt.
Dominic waited at the curb.
He drove a normal black SUV.
No security convoy.
No men stepping out first.
I looked around.
“That’s it?”
“What were you expecting?”
“Discretion.”
“This is discretion.”
“You used to define discretion as twelve armed men pretending not to look armed.”
“I have grown.”
“So have I.”
He looked at me.
“You look older.”
“Drive.”
He laughed.
We did not go to the estate.
I had sold it nine months into my sentence.
That decision made headlines for three days.
People wrote sentimental nonsense about the fall of a dynasty.
The truth was simpler.
I no longer wanted fifty rooms built around rules nobody remembered choosing.
The property went to a hospitality group after preservation restrictions were placed on the historic sections.
Staff received transition packages through outside administration.
Nobody needed my permission to continue living.
I bought a townhouse in Lincoln Park.
Still expensive.
I had not discovered poverty as a personality exercise.
But smaller.
Warmer.
Fewer doors.
Dominic pulled up outside.
I stared at the front steps.
“Why are there balloons?”
He shrugged.
“I know nothing.”
“Liar.”
The door opened.
Lily ran out.
She was five now.
Longer legs.
Same curls.
Yellow coat instead of yellow dress.
“Mister Murphy!”
She hit me at full speed.
I caught her.
For one second, eighteen months vanished.
Then she pulled back and inspected my face.
“You have more lines.”
Dominic turned away to hide laughter.
“Thank you.”
“Old.”
“I missed you too.”
She grabbed my hand.
“Come.”
Inside, Allie stood in the hallway.
She looked different.
Not dramatically.
More certain.
She had finished a certification program in healthcare administration while I was away and taken a job with a patient-advocacy nonprofit tied to neither my companies nor my money.
I knew because she wrote about classes in nearly every letter and complained about statistics with impressive creativity.
She smiled.
“Hi.”
“Hi.”
For eighteen months, our relationship had lived in letters, supervised visits, and calls.
No promises.
No declarations.
No money transferred between us.
No arrangement disguised as romance.
Now we stood six feet apart and neither of us knew what came next.
Lily solved it.
“Hug.”
Allie laughed.
I looked at her.
“Apparently we have instructions.”
“Apparently.”
We hugged.
Briefly at first.
Then not quite as briefly.
When we separated, Dominic became deeply interested in a framed picture on the wall.
Coward.
My father was in the kitchen.
That stopped me harder than anything else.
Michael Moretti had aged another five years in eighteen months.
Or maybe I had finally learned to see age.
He stood.
“Son.”
“Dad.”
We hugged too.
Awkwardly.
Better than the first one after his return, which had happened in a hospital and mostly consisted of both of us not knowing where to put our arms.
Vincent arrived ten minutes later.
He had completed his sentence six months before me.
He carried cannoli.
Of course.
“Tradition,” he said.
“Diabetes,” I answered.
Lily opened the box before anyone finished arguing.
The table had six chairs.
Not twenty.
Allie.
Lily.
My father.
Vincent.
Dominic.
Me.
No seat was called the head.
I noticed.
I suspected Allie had done it on purpose.
We ate lunch.
Nobody asked permission.
Nobody lowered their voice because I entered.
Vincent and my father argued about baseball.
Dominic claimed both were wrong.
Lily dipped strawberries in whipped cream and fed one to Fantasma when she thought nobody was looking.
The cat had moved into Allie’s apartment during my sentence and apparently developed shared custody.
I planned to sue.
After lunch, Lily grabbed my hand.
“Come see.”
She pulled me upstairs.
The townhouse had a small study.
The door stood open.
I stopped.
Inside was my old sofa from the estate.
No gun beneath the cushion.
A bookshelf.
Photographs.
One of Sofia at nineteen making a face at the camera.
One of my mother.
One of my father after his return.
One of Vincent holding cannoli while Lily stole one.
And on the sofa:
The gray blanket.
Folded perfectly.
Lily pointed.
“I kept warm.”
My throat closed.
“You did.”
She ran to the thermostat.
“Look.”
Sixty-eight degrees.
I laughed.
“Who set that?”
“Me.”
Allie appeared in the doorway.
“She absolutely did not.”
Lily frowned.
“I helped.”
“You watched me press buttons.”
“Help.”
I sat on the sofa.
Lily climbed beside me and immediately pulled the blanket over both of us.
Allie leaned against the doorframe.
“This room has one rule.”
I looked at her.
“No locked door.”
My instinct reacted before my mind did.
Private room.
Files.
Space.
Then I looked at Lily.
At the open hallway behind Allie.
At sunlight across the floor.
“Fine.”
Allie smiled.
“Painful?”
“Extremely.”
“Good.”
Over the next months, I learned release was not the end of consequences.
There were reporting requirements.
Business restrictions.
Civil settlements.
Board oversight.
The restitution fund continued distributing money to families harmed by the housing scheme.
I was permitted no control over its decisions.
That was intentional.
I remained wealthy.
Pretending otherwise would have been dishonest.
But I was no longer the undisputed head of an organization where one irritated look could become someone else’s order.
Some legitimate companies survived under independent management.
Others were sold.
Anything that could not be separated from criminal activity was wound down under legal supervision.
People online argued whether I had changed.
I stopped reading.
Change was already difficult enough without strangers scoring it.
Marco was convicted on multiple counts tied to the housing scheme, Sofia’s crash, and Vincent’s kidnapping.
Rusk received his own sentence.
Adrian was never charged in the scheme after evidence established his credentials had been misused, but he resigned from the company and started over elsewhere.
Celeste did not follow him.
They divorced quietly.
Vincent opened a small consulting business under restrictions that made him complain about paperwork every week.
My father stayed in Chicago under a revised protection arrangement.
He and I saw each other Sundays.
Sometimes we had nothing to say.
We learned silence did not have to mean secrets.
Allie and I moved slowly.
Infuriatingly slowly.
Our first actual date happened four months after my release.
Public restaurant.
No driver waiting.
No security at the next table.
Dominic claimed that was irresponsible.
I told him to develop hobbies.
At dinner, Allie looked at me over a candle.
“You know I don’t need rescuing.”
“I know.”
“You know Lily does not need another father.”
“I know.”
“She has me.”
“Yes.”
“And you don’t get to buy solutions when we disagree.”
I sighed.
“That feels overly specific.”
“Because I know you.”
That sentence did something dangerous to my chest.
“What do I get?”
She thought.
“A chance.”
“That’s all?”
“That’s huge.”
She was right.
So I took it.
Lily eventually stopped calling me Mister Murphy.
Not because I asked.
One morning, she ran into the kitchen and said, “Uncle Murphy, Fantasma ate my ribbon.”
I froze.
Allie froze.
Lily kept talking.
Children make emotional milestones and then demand cereal.
I gave her cereal.
Later, I went into the study and cried for ten minutes.
Nobody saw.
I told Allie anyway.
That part mattered.
On the third anniversary of Sofia’s death after my release, we went to the cemetery together.
Me.
My father.
Vincent.
Allie.
Lily.
Dominic remained near the car because he claimed cemeteries made him itchy.
Nobody believed him.
Lily placed a strawberry on Sofia’s grave.
I stared.
“Why?”
“She looks like strawberry person.”
Allie laughed.
I had never told Lily Sofia loved strawberries.
Maybe coincidence.
Maybe the universe occasionally had jokes.
My father stood beside the headstone.
“I’m sorry, baby girl.”
His voice broke.
Vincent looked away.
I put one hand on the stone.
For years, I came alone because I believed grief became less real if witnessed.
Now five people stood around me.
Sofia was no less dead.
I was no less her brother.
Nothing about sharing the pain reduced love.
It simply reduced loneliness.
That evening, everyone came back to the townhouse.
Lily insisted on dinner in the study because she wanted to show my father a drawing.
We carried plates in.
I almost objected.
Food in the office.
Old rule.
Then I remembered the room had one rule now.
No locked door.
We ate there.
Spaghetti.
Vincent spilled sauce on the rug.
I stared at him.
He stared back.
“Do it,” he said.
“Do what?”
“Become the old Murphy over a rug.”
I considered.
Then handed him a towel.
“Clean it.”
He laughed.
Lily climbed onto the sofa with the gray blanket and opened The Little Queen and the Winter Garden.
The blue book had been released from evidence months earlier.
We had repaired the binding but left Sofia’s misspelled name inside.
Lily patted the cushion beside her.
“Story.”
I sat.
“You read.”
“No.”
“Why?”
“You’re better.”
“I’m five.”
“Exactly. Stronger literary instincts.”
Allie threw a pillow at me.
I opened the book.
The story was about a queen whose garden froze after she lost someone she loved.
I had forgotten that.
Or maybe I never understood it when Sofia and I were children.
The queen spent years blaming winter.
Then learned the garden had not died.
It had been waiting.
Lily leaned against my arm.
The gray blanket covered both our knees.
Allie sat on the floor nearby.
My father and Vincent argued quietly behind us about dessert.
Fantasma slept in the doorway.
The thermostat read sixty-eight.
I reached the final page.
Lily looked up.
“Again.”
I laughed.
“Tomorrow.”
“No. Again.”
For three years, I had built my life around never being asked for anything I did not control.
Now a five-year-old was ordering a second bedtime story in a room that no longer locked.
I looked at Allie.
She smiled.
I turned back to page one.
“My name is Murphy Moretti,” I said.
Lily frowned.
“That not story.”
“No.”
I looked around the warm room.
May you like
“No. It isn’t.”
Then I opened Sofia’s book and began again.
