Chapter 8 - Face to Face
The air in the private dining room left my lungs in a single rush as I crossed the threshold. Behind me, tall and silent, walked Sal, ensuring no one blocked our path.
Julian stopped dead in his tracks, his eyes bulging as if he were staring at a phantom rising from a grave. He looked at me, then at Dominic, then back at me, his mouth opening and closing like a fish gasping for air.
"C-Clara?" he choked out, his voice cracking into a high-pitched squeak. "You're... you're dead. The bridge... how are you—?"
"I was never on that bridge, Julian," I said, my voice steady, cold, and stripped of every ounce of the grief I had carried for four agonizing years. I walked right up to him, stopping just two feet away, looking down at the man who had traded his family for a bank account. "You told everyone I was fragile. You told everyone I couldn't handle the pressure. But you were the coward. You ran away because you couldn't face the consequences of your own greed."
Julian’s eyes darted wildly around the room, searching for an escape hatch, a window, anything. But there was nowhere to run.
"Clara, listen to me," Julian stammered, his hands reaching out to grab my shoulders in a pathetic display of desperate manipulation. "I did it for us! I did it to secure our future! That money—it was supposed to bring us together in the islands—"
Smack.
The sound of my hand connecting with his cheek echoed sharply off the wood-paneled walls of the dining room. Julian stumbled backward, clutching his stinging cheek, staring at me with genuine shock.
"Don't ever touch me," I whispered, my voice trembling with a righteous fury that felt entirely liberating. "And don't you ever speak our daughter's name again."
Before Julian could recover, the federal prosecutor stepped forward, snapping a pair of heavy steel handcuffs around Julian’s wrists with practiced efficiency.
"Julian Vance, you are under arrest for federal wire fraud, financial identity theft, and obstruction of justice," the prosecutor declared crisply. "You have the right to remain silent..."
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As the federal agents hauled my estranged husband toward the back exit, kicking and screaming empty threats into the empty hallway, I stood in the center of the room, letting out a long, shuddering breath. The ghost was gone. The nightmare was over.
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