She started toward the door, then reached back without looking.
Justin took her hand.
Together they walked inside.
Years later, Prince would not remember the court filings or the lies or the polished cruelty of old money trying to choose his life for him. Children rarely remember the architecture of adult damage.
He would remember other things.
His mother reading stories on rainy nights.
His father learning how to braid action figures into bedtime adventures because he had missed the baby years and refused to miss anything else.
The foundation with his name on it, where families found beds, meals, legal help, and enough breathing room to begin again.
The way his parents sometimes looked at each other across the dinner table like two people who had crossed a desert and still couldn’t quite believe they had made it out alive.
He would grow up knowing the truth, but not as poison.
As warning.
As inheritance of a better kind.
And Justin Lane, who had once believed power meant never kneeling, learned at last that the strongest thing a man could do was stay.
THE END
