The million-dollar settlement remained under structures my Canadian lawyers had already arranged. Selina and Godfrey had no claim to it. The financial investigation into the earlier transfers took months. Some purchases were easier to trace than others. Some money was gone forever. Civil claims proceeded alongside the investigation into forged documents and financial misconduct. The video from the backyard also became important evidence of how Phedra had been treated, though the exact legal consequences depended on what prosecutors could establish rather than what I wanted them to charge.
I did not wake up the next morning magically owning Godfrey’s business.
My mother was not thrown onto the sidewalk by lunchtime.
Reality was slower than revenge stories.
But it was also harder to escape.
Godfrey eventually lost the shop because too much of it had been built on money he could not justify and debts he could no longer service once the financial structure was exposed. The SUV was sold. The house became part of a complicated civil dispute because my money had funded substantial improvements while title and ownership were not as simple as I had once believed. We eventually recovered a meaningful portion of what had been taken, but not all of it.
