Chapter 8 - Rebuilding the House
The house felt different once Aaron's belongings were finally, formally removed six weeks after the fundraiser — not empty exactly, but lighter in a way I hadn't expected, like a held breath finally released after months of not realizing how tightly I'd been holding it.
Sophie helped me repaint the study that had been Aaron's home office, a small, deliberate project neither of us had discussed in advance but that felt, once we started, like exactly the right thing to be doing together on a quiet Saturday afternoon.
"What do you want to do with this room now?" Sophie asked, rolling pale blue paint over a wall that had spent eighteen years holding Aaron's financial certifications and framed photographs of golf trips I'd never been invited on.
"I was thinking a proper home office," I said. "For consulting work. Patricia's asked me twice now about joining the foundation's finance committee formally, and I keep thinking about all those other families who called me, worried about their kids' scholarships. Maybe there's something real I could build out of that."
"Forensic accounting, but for schools specifically?" Sophie asked, considering it with genuine interest.
"Something like that," I said. "Making sure what happened to Kingsley's scholarship fund doesn't happen quietly at other schools that don't have someone paying close enough attention."
Sophie smiled, setting down her paint roller. "I think that's a really good idea, Mom. Genuinely."
My sister Marnie, who'd extended her visit far longer than either of us originally planned, poked her head into the study that evening holding two glasses of wine. "You're glowing, you know. In a house you just tore your ex-husband's fraud scheme out of. That's either deeply unhinged or genuinely impressive."
"Maybe both," I admitted, accepting the wine gratefully.
Aaron, meanwhile, had accepted the plea arrangement his attorney negotiated — full restitution of the misappropriated funds, contingent on liquidating most of his personal assets, alongside a sentence that would keep him out of my and Sophie's daily lives for a meaningful stretch of years. He'd requested, through his attorney, limited supervised visitation with Sophie, a request she considered carefully before ultimately declining, at least for the time being.
"I'm not ready," she told me, the evening she made that decision. "Maybe someday. But I need more time before I can be in a room with him and not think about you standing there with cake on your face while he laughed."
"That's completely fair," I told her, meaning it entirely. "You don't owe him access on his timeline, Sophie. Only on yours, whenever that day comes, if it ever does."
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By late spring, Sophie had been accepted into her first-choice university's forensic accounting and criminal justice program, an acceptance letter that arrived on an ordinary Tuesday and that she opened at the kitchen table with the same steady composure she'd carried through every difficult moment of the previous six months.
"I want to do what you did," she told me, setting the letter down carefully. "Find the truth in the numbers before anyone else even knows to look for it."
