When the session was finally adjourned, Simon helped me stand up and asked if I needed to see a doctor right away. I hesitated for a moment but then looked down at my stomach and realized that my health mattered more than my pride.
“Yes, I would like to be checked out,” I said. In the hallway, the courthouse looked exactly the same as it had when I arrived, but I felt like a completely different person.
Megan arrived a short time later and hugged me so hard that I finally let out the tears I had been holding back all day. At the hospital, the staff was kind and the room was quiet while they monitored the baby’s heart rate for a few hours.
I turned my phone off because I didn’t want to see the dozens of messages from Harrison’s family or his business associates. For the first time in a very long time, I did not owe a single person an explanation for my existence.
Simon called me late that night to tell me that the Miller Manor properties were already being flagged for a legal hold. He also mentioned that the judge had a personal reason for remembering my mother’s name from years ago.
Before he was a judge, he had been a young lawyer representing a tenant who lived in one of my mother’s small apartment buildings. My mother had refused to evict the woman while she was going through a difficult medical crisis, and he had never forgotten that act of grace.
The next morning, I returned to the estate with two police officers and Megan to collect my belongings and secure the house. I walked into the nursery and saw that Tiffany had already replaced my favorite curtains with something cold and modern.
She had even moved my mother’s old wooden rocking chair into the dark corner of the garage. We found it behind a stack of empty boxes, and although it was dusty and scratched, it was still solid and whole.
We carried it back into the nursery and I sat in it for a long time while the sun filled the room. The house was quiet, and for once, the silence did not feel like a heavy weight or a looming threat.
I saw Harrison’s wedding ring on the kitchen counter next to a pile of legal documents he had left behind. I did not touch the gold band, but I did pick up the folder that contained the records for Miller Manor.
Leaving Harrison did not fix everything in a single day, and it did not take away the fear that still lingered in my mind. But it gave me back the one thing he had worked so hard to make me forget over the last six years.
