Chapter 11 - No More Clean Hands
By noon, the story was online.
MORETTI HEIR’S EX-WIFE IN MEDICAL DISPUTE.
By one, it was worse.
HIDDEN PREGNANCY. FAMILY FORTUNE. ORGANIZED CRIME TIES.
Someone had photographed me through a clinic window.
My hand was on my stomach.
Adrian was on his knees.
Millions of strangers were deciding what kind of woman I was.
Ruth took my phone.
“Enough.”
I let her.
Adrian stood beside the window.
“I can make calls.”
“To do what?” I asked.
He turned.
“Get the picture taken down. Find the source.”
“And frighten everyone into being quiet?”
His mouth closed.
“Sit down, Adrian.”
He sat.
I was tired of loving a man whose first instinct was to reach for power.
“I need something from you.”
“Anything.”
“Stop saying that unless you mean it.”
He waited.
“Give Ortiz the company records.”
Marco looked up sharply.
Adrian didn’t.
“All of them,” I said.
Ruth’s face changed.
“That requires separate criminal counsel.”
“Then get him one.”
Adrian watched me.
“You understand what that could do?”
“Yes.”
“It could put me in prison.”
“I know.”
For the first time, I thought he might walk out.
Instead, he nodded.
“All right.”
Marco stepped forward.
“Adrian.”
“No more.”
“What about Peter?”
His voice cracked on the name.
Adrian looked at him.
“This is what I’m doing about Peter.”
That afternoon, his criminal lawyer arrived.
By evening, arrangements had been made for Adrian to turn over records through counsel and speak with investigators.
Nobody promised immunity.
Nobody promised he would come home.
I watched him initial pages without asking me to be grateful.
Then Emma confessed something else.
Lucia hadn’t merely paid her debt.
She’d had Victor buy it.
Every late payment.
Every threat.
Every photograph Emma received.
They had tightened the trap before offering to save her.
Emma had still made her choices.
But now I understood how carefully they’d been prepared.
Ortiz secured a warrant for Lucia’s apartment.
The second phone was exactly where Emma said it would be.
So was a folder labeled with my name.
Inside were photographs of my building.
My classroom.
The grocery store where I shopped.
And one picture that made my blood go cold.
Me asleep on my own couch.
Taken from inside my apartment.
On the back was a date.
Three nights earlier.
I looked at Emma.
She shook her head before I asked.
“I didn’t let anyone in.”
Then my phone, lying on the bedside table, lit up.
May you like
An unknown number.
You should have stayed divorced.
