Ella
Six months had passed since the verdicts, and the Foundation's offices no longer felt like borrowed space. I'd repainted the walls a warm cream that had nothing left of Vanessa's cold, corporate taste, replaced the sterile furniture with pieces that actually felt like mine, and hung a single photograph of my parents on the wall behind my desk, the same one I'd carried in my memory through eleven months of training and a year of quiet vengeance.
The transition hadn't been immediate. In the first weeks after taking over as director, I'd found myself second-guessing every decision, waiting for some board member to challenge my right to sit in that chair, waiting for the old flinch of uncertainty to surface the way it always had whenever I stepped into a room full of people deciding, mo
