Chapter 21 - The New Foundation
By our first anniversary, life had settled into a rhythm of peace and purpose.
Sterling had accepted a plea bargain of twenty-two years for attempted murder and financial fraud, serving his sentence in a state penitentiary three hundred miles north. Bernice, stripped of every asset and deemed a flight risk, had been sentenced to ten years in a low-security medical correctional facility for grand larceny, forgery, and witness tampering.
I never visited them. I never wrote. Their lawyer had attempted to send letters begging for commissary allowances, but each envelope was returned unopened, stamped *Refused by Addressee.*
Instead, Julian and I focused on building something real from the ruins.
Using four million dollars from Arthur’s royalty fund, we established the *Arthur Vance Foundation for Youth Autonomy*—a network of safe houses and educational grants designed to help young adults escape emotionally and financially abusive households. Every month, I personally reviewed the grant applications, signing checks that gave young women and men the deposit money for their first apartments, their college textbooks, and the legal assistance needed to cut ties with predatory relatives.
One Tuesday afternoon, while working in the foundation’s Philadelphia office, Evelyn Vance walked in carrying an oversized manila envelope stamped with a red wax seal.
"Evelyn," I said, smiling as I stood up from my desk to embrace her. "What brings you all the way down from the state registry?"
Evelyn didn't smile with her usual warmth. Her expression was solemn, her eyes troubled as she laid the heavy envelope on my desk.
"Elaine, the state finished the final forensic liquidation of Bernice’s safety deposit boxes yesterday," she said softly. "The ones she held under aliases in Delaware."
I frowned, feeling a faint tremor of old apprehension ripple through my stomach. "I thought everything had been inventoried and seized by the court."
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"It was," Evelyn said. "Except for a sealed inner compartment in Box 19. It wasn't registered under Bernice's name or Arthur's name. It was registered under a company name that dissolved forty years ago: *Vance & Halloway Genetics.*"
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