Chapter 9: Morning
By four in the morning, the house was quiet in a way it hadn't been in months.
Victoria had been escorted out without raising her voice, exactly as she had promised.
She had asked for her coat.
One of Reeves's people had retrieved it.
She had walked to the car with her back straight and her chin level, and she had not looked back at the house.
Julian had gone more quietly still.
He had asked me, just before they led him out, whether I would tell him when the baby came.
I hadn't answered.
Reeves had stayed for an hour, sitting at the kitchen table with Rosa and a recording device, working through the notebook entry by entry.
When they finished, he shook Rosa's hand and told her she had done something that mattered.
Rosa had nodded and gone to make herself a fresh cup of tea.
Garrett Hale had been picked up at his Annapolis property at 2:30 a.m.
The Meridian Private transfer had been fully frozen.
The shell corporation controlling my assets had been flagged for immediate review, and a forensic accounting team would begin work on the documents in the morning.
I knew, sitting at the kitchen table after Reeves left, that the legal process would take months.
Possibly longer.
That there would be attorneys and hearings and documents and days when it would feel unresolved and grinding and far from over.
But the money was frozen.
The people responsible were in custody.
And my house was mine again.
I went upstairs.
Maya was awake.
She had moved to the chair by the window, wrapped in the blanket from the bed, watching the driveway below.
She had seen the cars leave.
"It's done?" she said.
"For tonight.
The rest will take time."
She nodded slowly.
I pulled the ottoman close and sat beside her.
We were quiet for a while.
Outside, the sky was beginning to shift — not light yet, but less dark.
That particular hour when night starts to lose its confidence.
"I owe you an apology," I said.
She looked at me.
"I left you here," I said.
"I trusted the wrong people and I left you here and I wasn't reachable when you needed me.
That's on me.
None of what happened to you is your fault, but the fact that you had to go through it alone — that's mine."
Maya was quiet for a moment.
"I thought about leaving," she said.
"In the third month.
I had a plan.
I was going to take Rosa's car and drive to my sister's in Charlottesville." She looked at the window.
"But I was afraid they'd use it against you somehow.
That they'd say I abandoned the marriage, abandoned the assets.
That it would give them more leverage." She paused.
"So I stayed.
And I kept signing what they put in front of me and I kept pretending I didn't know what was happening and I kept the baby safe."
"You did," I said.
"You kept her safe."
Maya looked at me.
"Her?"
"I don't actually know," I said.
"I've been saying her in my head for six months."
Something shifted in Maya's face.
The exhaustion was still there, and the weight of everything that had happened, but underneath it something else surfaced.
Something that had been waiting a long time to come out.
She laughed.
It was small and tired and real, and it was the best sound I had heard since I walked through the door.
I reached over and put my hand over hers, over the curve of her belly, and this time she didn't pull away.
We sat like that while the sky outside slowly changed color.
At 5:47 a.m., Maya shifted in the chair and said, very calmly, "Daniel.
May you like
I think we need to go to the hospital."
I was on my feet before she finished the sentence.
