Author's Clarification.
Hello to all who have followed this a few of you are unreachable through PM (due to being unregistered), I'm taking a moment to address you through this chapter. I normally would have put it in an author's note in the next chapter, but since the story is at an end, this seemed the best route.

I am just tacking on a little explanatory comment about the creative decision to have Dale the Whale will Adrian money. I very much appreciate and trust the early feedback on that chapter and have no quarrels with the views expressed. In fact, Alex Hoodle and Kitty Kat have become two people whose opinions I value highly and therefore, I pay attention to their constructive criticism - particularly in regards to the Epilogue.

For the rest, who haven't reviewed the chapter yet, I feel like I could have done a better job at being clearer as to my intent in that chapter. I'll attempt to explain here, just to help bring a little more resolution to the story's end.

At the beginning of Monk, we see Dale the Whale piled up in bed in his mansion, eating corn dogs and watching some politician on closed circuit television. Biederbeck was described as someone who owned half of San Francisco and had options on the other half. In no way, shape, or form is he a good guy or redeemable. But, because he is so corrupt, it is simply beyond him to think that everyone else isn't corrupt as well. After all, he uses his money to buy anything and anyone he wants and people degrade themselves before him all the time.

With this in mind, when he gives the money to Adrian, it is his way of attacking Monk's virtue. He has watched Monk maintain his integrity through the bankrupting of Monk and Trudy, through Trudy's death, and through various and sundry things that have come into Monk's life ever since, including pain and turmoil caused by Dale himself. He has seen Monk's righteous indignation and anger first hand. Because he doesn't have the ideological framework to conceive that someone could have an unhappy childhood, find love only to lose it, go through Hell and back and still maintain their goodness, he decides to use the corrupting influence of money, not to bless Adrian, but to curse him. He truly believes, everyone has their price - and, in his mind, that includes Adrian Monk. It might be risky, but if he could succeed in getting Monk to fall, it would be his last act of revenge. When Dale 'died', he already had Monk's son. With the gift of money, he also wanted his character.

Monk, on the other hand, was exactly as virtuous as we know him to be. Adrian Monk, in my stories, is an accidental millionaire. He doesn't need Biederbeck's money, nor is he remotely interested in it for himself. This is consistent with the TV character in that, while miserly, in Season 4 Adrian was seen as far more interested in the cleanliness of the Police Station than he is in the 'big reward', and when Natalie revealed she was a Davenport, he was surprised but treated her no differently than he ever had. Simply put, Monk was around wealth all the time and it didn't impress him.

As such, he never had any intention of taking anything that Dale had to give him for his own personal benefit. He and Natalie knew that Biederbeck was taunting them. They just didn't know with what. Together, they made the decision to accept the money - not for themselves, but to use Dale's ill-gotten gains to bring good and justice for those whom Biederbeck and his ilk had harmed. In other words, their final act towards Dale was to spend his fortune trying to repair the damage he had done and make people's lives better. If it hadn't been for their recent experience with Lee, they probably wouldn't have accepted the money or, if they had, the would have had a bonfire with it.

Anyway, that was my thinking on that particular twist in the story. Sorry if it fell of the tracks a little at the end. You all are a fantastic group. I look forward to continuing that relationship in the next story.