Hate Me Like You Love Me (Serena and Caleb) novel Chapter 109

Caleb’s POV

Empires don't collapse the way people think they do — not with a single thunderclap, but with a slow, steady hemorrhage that nobody notices until the floor is already red.

The news about Bennett & Associates trickles in over the days following the verdict. A formal investigation into the firm's pattern of covering up Lucas's assaults.

Three senior partners tendering their resignations within forty-eight hours of each other. A client list that once read like a Fortune 500 roster now shrinking by the day as companies quietly distance themselves from the stench of complicity.

I follow it all from a distance, the way you watch a building you once feared burn to the ground. There's no satisfaction in it. Just the grim awareness that wreckage is wreckage, regardless of who deserves it.

It's a Tuesday afternoon when I pull into a gas station off Route 9, the kind of unremarkable place that exists solely to refuel and forget. I'm reaching for the nozzle when I see him standing at the next pump.

Richard Bennett.

He looks like a man who's been wearing the same suit for three days. The tie is gone. The shirt collar is open, revealing skin that sags where confidence used to hold it taut.

His hair, always immaculately combed at every gala and fundraiser I've ever had the displeasure of attending, is uncombed and streaked with more gray than I remember.

He's aged a decade since the courtroom.

Our eyes meet over the roof of his sedan, and for a long moment neither of us moves. The pump clicks and hums between us, filling the silence with mechanical indifference.

"Caleb." His voice carries none of the authority I'm used to hearing. It sounds scraped out, like he's been talking to lawyers and empty rooms for days.

"Mr. Bennett."

He nods slowly, as if the formality is both expected and exhausting. His hand rests on the gas pump with the loose grip of a man who's forgotten why he stopped here.

"I'd ask how you're doing," he says, "but I imagine the answer is better than me."

"I wouldn't assume that." I lean against my car and cross my arms. "The last few months haven't exactly been a vacation for anyone."

Richard exhales through his nose, a sound that's almost a laugh but doesn't quite make it. He replaces the nozzle and turns to face me fully, and the resignation in his posture makes my chest tighten with recognition I didn't expect to feel.

I've seen that posture before. On my mother, in the years after Simon. On myself, in the mirror after races I swore it would be my last.

The posture of someone standing in the rubble of a life they built with their own hands.

"I've been trying to figure out when it went wrong," Richard says, his gaze drifting past me toward the highway.

"Patricia thinks it was college. That Lucas changed when he left home, fell in with the wrong crowd, lost his way." He pauses. "But that's not true, is it? You don't become what he became overnight."

"No." My voice comes out quiet. "You don't."

"I spent thirty years building something I thought was a legacy." Richard's jaw works around the words like they're costing him physically. "Turns out I was just building a wall around a monster."

The sentence lands between us with the weight of a confession that's been sitting in his throat for weeks, maybe longer.

I watch his face crumble at the edges before he pulls it back together with visible effort, and the grief there is so raw and unmistakable that I have to look away for a second.

The question comes out blunt, but I don't soften it. He doesn't deserve softness from me, and I think he knows that.

"No." Richard meets my eyes with a directness that wasn't there before. "She's not wrong. I built that machine. Every settlement, every NDA, every woman we paid to disappear — I signed off on all of it because it was easier than looking at what my son actually was."

I let the silence hold after that, because there's nothing I can add that would hurt more than what he's already carrying.

And the truth is, anger isn't what's rising in my chest right now. It's the quiet, aching weight of understanding — the kind you'd give anything not to feel because it means you recognize the shape of someone else's failure from the inside.

Richard reaches into his jacket pocket and pulls out a business card. He holds it out to me, and his hand is steady even though nothing else about him seems to be.

"If Simon contacts you again," he says, "call this number. It's a family law specialist. Not one of mine." A pause. "A good one."

I stare at the card. Cream-colored stock, embossed lettering, the name and number of someone I've never heard of.

"Why?" The question is genuine.

"Because I spent three decades protecting the wrong person." Richard's throat moves with a hard swallow. "Consider it the only decent thing I'll ever do for your family."

I take the card. The paper is smooth between my fingers, warm from his pocket, impossibly small for the weight of what it represents — a man's entire empire crumbled down to one last gesture of decency, offered in a gas station parking lot to the son of a man just as broken as his own.

Richard turns back to his car without another word. He moves like a man who's forgotten how to occupy space, shoulders curved inward, steps careful and uncertain.

I watch him pull out of the lot and merge onto the highway, his sedan disappearing into the flow of traffic like any other car driven by any other man on any other Tuesday.