Chapter 140: A Time of Grief
Diane’s POV
An envelope arrived on a Tuesday morning, four days after we’d laid Sophie to rest. I recognized the handwriting immediately...Liam’s careful script, now somehow smaller and more hesitant than I remembered. The prison return address made my stomach clench, but I tore it open anyway, reading through his words with a mixture of exhaustion and indifference.
My dearest Diane... I know I have no right... I’m sorry for not being the man you deserved...
The words blurred together, generic apologies that felt hollow after everything we’d been through. I folded the letter back up and tucked it into the drawer of my nightstand without ceremony.
Four months later, that drawer would be stuffed with similar letters, all expressing variations of the same remorse, the same pleas for understanding. I stopped reading them after the first few. What was the point? Sophie was dead. Mom was broken. No amount of Liam’s prison-cell letters could change that.
The media storm that followed Sophie’s death was relentless. Every news outlet seemed to have their own version of the story—"Custody Battle Turns Deadly," "Sister Dies Protecting Twins," "CEO’s Ex-Wife’s Family Targeted in Home Invasion."
They dissected every inch of our lives turning Sophie’s heroic sacrifice into fodder for their twenty-four-hour news cycle.
Jackson Torres’s death only added fuel to the fire. Found tortured and mutilated in an abandoned warehouse, stripped of identification, his fingers and eyes removed—whoever had killed him wanted to ensure he could never reveal who had hired him.
The brutality of it should have satisfied some dark corner of my grief, but instead it only deepened my sense of helplessness. Sophie would never get the justice she deserved because her killer had been silenced forever.