Chapter 2

The next month was a blur of slammed doors and hung-up phones.

Every lawyer in Chicago gave me the same answer.

"I'm sorry, Mrs. Johns, but taking on the Hughes family... it's professional suicide."

"There's no evidence, Gabrielle. No footage, no witnesses willing to talk. I can't build a case on nothing."

"My firm has a long-standing relationship with Hughes Corp. I can't help you."

I lost my job. Mr. Hughes made a single phone call to city hall, and the funding for the community center where I worked was suddenly "under review." My boss, a good man named David, had to let me go with tears in his eyes.

"They threatened to shut us down completely if you stayed, Gabrielle. I'm so sorry."

Then the lawsuit arrived. Barney Hughes was suing me. For harassment, for emotional distress, for attempting to extort money from his family. It was a sick joke, but the legal papers were real.

I stopped sleeping. I stopped eating. The apartment, once filled with the sounds of Andrew's laughter and Caleb's running feet, was suffocatingly silent. I would sit on the floor of Caleb's room for hours, holding his favorite stuffed dinosaur, rocking back and forth.

One night, the silence was shattered.

The front door splintered open. Barney Hughes stood there, flanked by three of his thuggish friends. They were drunk, laughing.

"Look at this dump," Barney slurred, kicking over a lamp. "And she tried to sue me. Can you believe the nerve?"

They moved through my home like a storm. They smashed the television. They ripped Caleb's drawings from the refrigerator. They went into the bedroom and tore through our things.

I stood frozen in the hallway, unable to move, unable to scream.

One of them saw the photos on the mantelpiece. A picture of my parents, my father proud in his Army uniform. A picture of Andrew's parents, both decorated Marines from their time in Vietnam.

"Hey, look, a bunch of jarheads," one of the thugs sneered. He swept his arm across the mantel, sending the framed photos crashing to the floor. The glass shattered. He stomped on them for good measure, grinding the images of our parents into the floorboards with his boot.

That's when I moved. I ran at him, not thinking, just reacting.

Barney caught me. He spun me around and slammed me against the wall. My head hit the plaster with a sickening crack. The room swam. He hit me again, a hard, open-handed slap that sent me sprawling to the floor.

His friends laughed. They kicked me as I lay there, in my ribs, my stomach. Pain exploded through my body.

I curled into a ball, trying to protect myself.

Barney loomed over me, his face twisted in a drunken, vicious grin. He was holding a small, gray plastic bag.

"You know what this is, bitch?" he hissed.

My blood ran cold. I knew. It was the "ashes" his father's people had sent me in a cheap box, the final insult.

"I got tired of you crying all over the news," Barney said. "Time to really get over it."

He ripped the bag open.

He dumped the contents over my head.

A coarse, gray dust filled my hair, my eyes, my mouth. It coated my bruised and tear-streaked face. The ashes of my husband and my son.

"Now you can be with them forever," he mocked, as his friends howled with laughter.

He stood over me, unzipped his pants, and began to urinate on the floor next to my head, the foul stream splashing onto the scattered ashes and my clothes.

"That's what I think of you and your dead family," he spat.

Then they left, their laughter echoing down the hall as I lay there, broken, covered in the desecrated remains of everything I had ever loved.