Two days later, back at his harbor-facing apartment, Julian received a message from Captain Maya Ellison, his mentor in the JAG office. “Come in tomorrow. We need to talk.”
The next morning, she handed him a file — a new assignment involving a complicated elderly exploitation case.
“You understand this type of emotional landscape better than most,” she said. He agreed to take it, though a strange tension lingered in his chest. His past wasn’t done with him yet — he could feel it.
That night, his phone rang. The caller ID made his stomach knot. His mother.
“You humiliated us,” she hissed. “Do you know what people are saying?”
“You humiliated yourselves,” he replied. Then his father’s voice came in, desperate and angry.
“We need help. We’re being evicted. You should share the money.”
“I owe you nothing,” Julian said quietly.
He hung up, unsettled not from guilt but from knowing desperate people often made reckless choices. The next morning, just as Captain Ellison handed him the official briefing for his new case, a security officer approached. “Lieutenant Mercer… a man and woman are demanding to see you.”
Of course.
His parents again. Julian met them in the lobby. His father grabbed his arm.
“You will listen. We are your parents.”
“This ends today,” Julian said firmly. But his mother whispered something that froze him.
“They’re coming for us, Julian. The people we owe money to. We needed the inheritance to pay them back.”
“So this was never about Grandma,” Julian said.
“You were covering your own debts.”
His father snapped, “You’re our son! You owe us—”
Julian cut him off. “I owe you nothing.
I survived two people who never wanted me.”
His mother burst into tears — not from remorse, but because control had finally slipped through her fingers. “Talk to a lawyer,” Julian said quietly. “And stay out of my life.”
He walked away, the glass doors closing behind him like a final chapter ending.
Captain Ellison called from her office, “Lieutenant Mercer, ready for your first briefing?”
Julian breathed in. For the first time in his life, free. “Ready.”
