Chapter 9 - The Eviction
Three days later, I returned to the Annapolis penthouse for the last time.
The police had already cleared the property following the execution of the federal search warrants. Julian Halston had been denied bail due to substantial offshore assets and private flight capability; Derek had been released on a five-hundred-thousand-dollar bond secured by his mother’s home, restricted to the state of Maryland, and fitted with an electronic ankle monitor.
The irony of the ankle monitor was not lost on me.
When I stepped off the elevator, the front door was open. Derek was sitting on the floor of the empty living room, surrounded by cardboard boxes. The Italian leather sofas were gone—seized by creditors who had moved with terrifying speed the moment the contract collapsed.
Derek looked up as my boots crossed the threshold.
He had lost ten pounds in seventy-two hours. His face was gray, stubbled with patchy, uneven beard growth, and the dark circles under his eyes looked like bruises. The ankle monitor blinked with a small, green LED light above his right sock.
“Mara,” he croaked.
I didn't answer. I walked past him to the small hall closet to retrieve my final set of reference books and my winter sea coat.
“They took everything,” he whispered, his voice shaking. “Julian’s accounts are frozen. The company filed Chapter 11 this morning. My mother... my mother won't even look at me. She says I ruined the family name.”
I pulled my coat from the hanger, draped it over my arm, and picked up the small box of books.
“You didn't ruin it, Derek,” I said, turning to face him. “You just showed people what it was made of.”
He dragged himself to his knees, crawling two feet across the bare concrete floor toward me, his hands clasped together in a posture of grotesque supplication.
“Mara, please,” he wept, the tears carving clean lines through the grime on his cheeks. “You have Vance’s ear. The newspapers are calling you a national hero. If you just tell the prosecutor that I didn't understand what I was signing... if you tell them that Julian coerced me... I won't have to go to prison! Mara, I can't survive in a federal facility! Look at me! I’m not built for that!”
I looked down at him from my full height.
For three years, this man had made me feel like an obligation. He had walked three steps ahead of me on city sidewalks so people wouldn't notice the hitch in my stride. He had winced when the titanium joint clicked during quiet dinners. He had reduced a decade of sacrifice, honor, and engineering excellence to a liability he had to apologize for.
And now he was on his knees, begging the woman he had called “half a person” to save him from the consequences of his own vanity.
“You’re right, Derek,” I said, my voice quiet, entirely devoid of malice, carrying only the flat finality of an iron door closing. “You aren't built for it.”
“Then help me!” he sobbed, reaching for the hem of my jeans.
I stepped back, out of his reach.
“When the blast doors went down on the *Hampton*,” I said, looking into his hollow, ruined face, “the temperature in that compartment was four hundred degrees. The water was up to our waists, and it was burning with turbine oil. Nathan Reddick didn't cry. He didn't beg. He grabbed the ladder with broken bones and he climbed because he knew other people were depending on him to clear the hatch.”
I adjusted the box of books in my arm.
“You signed a paper that would have sent three hundred sailors to sea with defective shafts, Derek. Just so you could buy another sports car and tell people you were a vice president.”
I turned toward the elevator.
“You’re going to prison, Derek. Not because I hate you. But because the sea doesn't care who your uncle is. And neither do I.”
The elevator doors chimed open.
I stepped inside, turned around, and pressed the button for the lobby. Through the narrowing gap of the sliding metal doors, I watched Derek Halston curl into a ball on the cold, bare floor of his ruined empire, weeping into his hands as the green light on his ankle monitor blinked steadily in the empty room.
May you like
The doors closed.
***
