CHAPTER 7
I walked over to my son, setting my cup on the console table before kneeling down beside him on the rug, wrapping my arms around his shaking shoulders.
"I forgive you, Jackson," I whispered into his ear as he cried like the little boy who used to run through our first small apartment. "But forgiveness does not mean things go back to the way they were."
"I don't want the money, Mom," Jackson choked out, shaking his head violently. "I don't want a single dollar of the one hundred twenty million. I just want my family back."
"The money was never the problem, Jackson," I said, pulling back to look into his eyes. "The problem was that you allowed someone to make you feel ashamed of the hard work that built your life."
Over the next three months, the legal storm raged across the local newspapers and financial outlets in Illinois.
Natalie’s high-priced defense attorney tried frantically to negotiate a plea deal, claiming she was suffering from extreme stress and mental strain during the wedding planning.
However, the state prosecutor refused to back down after my legal team provided video surveillance from my estate showing Natalie entering my bedroom with a pair of professional clippers.
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The stolen jewelry—worth over four hundred thousand dollars—was recovered from a luxury consignment shop in downtown Miami where Natalie had tried to fence it through a middleman.
Facing overwhelming evidence and felony grand larceny charges, Natalie pled guilty to avoid a trial, receiving a four-year sentence in a state correctional facility without the possibility of early parole
