Chapter 10: What Friday Brought
Richard Holt called at nine-seventeen on Friday morning.
"The DA's office has reviewed the referral," he said.
"They're proceeding.
Arrest warrants have been issued for Weston Hale and Corinne Hale.
Both are being taken into custody this morning."
I was at my office desk.
I set down my pen.
"Both of them," I said.
"Corinne's role as financial officer and her active participation in at least two of the earlier cases gave the DA enough to include her.
She'll face conspiracy charges in addition to the fraud counts."
I thought about Corinne's smile in that living room.
*A pregnant woman like you should be grateful any respectable man still wants you.*
"What happens now?" I said.
"They'll be processed and arraigned.
Given the amount and the number of complainants, bail will likely be set high.
Their attorney — and they do share an attorney, which is itself interesting — has already been notified." A brief pause.
"Ava, I want to say something that's slightly outside my professional lane."
"Go ahead."
"What you did — the documentation, the private investigator, the willingness to sit across from Simone and Dani and treat them as allies rather than threats — that's what made this case.
We had Dani's complaint.
Without your records and your cooperation, we had a difficult case.
With them, we have a straightforward one."
"Thank you for saying that."
"Take care of yourself," he said.
"And that baby."
I thanked him and ended the call.
I sat for a moment.
Then I picked up my phone and called Petra.
She answered on the second ring.
"It's done," I said.
A silence.
Then: "Both of them?"
"Both of them."
"Oh, Ava." Her voice went soft.
"Are you at the office?"
"Yes."
"Stay there.
I'm bringing lunch."
She arrived forty minutes later with sandwiches and the particular energy of someone who has been waiting for good news and is now allowing themselves to feel it.
She sat across from me at my desk and we ate and she talked and I mostly listened, which was what I needed.
"The wedding," she said eventually.
"Do you want help with the calls?"
"I've already drafted the message.
I'm sending it this afternoon." I had kept it simple.
*The wedding has been canceled.
I'm well and the baby is well.
I'll be in touch soon.* Sixty-three people.
Some would ask questions.
Most, I suspected, would understand more than I'd said.
"And the venue?
The band?"
"The venue has a cancellation clause.
I'll lose the deposit on two vendors.
It's fine." I looked at her.
"It's a small number compared to what I've already lost.
And I got most of that back the moment I walked out of Corinne's living room."
Petra looked at me for a moment.
"You know what I keep thinking about?"
"What?"
"The heel." She smiled.
"You were four months pregnant, you'd just been shoved into a wall, and your first instinct was to drive your heel into his foot."
"It was the only exit available."
"It was perfect." She reached across the desk and squeezed my hand.
"You were never going to let them win.
I don't think you knew that about yourself until that moment.
But I knew it."
I looked at her hand on mine.
"I'm going to be a single mother," I said.
It was the first time I'd said it out loud to another person.
"You're going to be a magnificent one."
"I'm terrified."
"I know.
I'll be there."
The afternoon light came through the office window and settled across the desk — across the files, the pen I'd set down when Richard Holt called, the half-eaten sandwich, Petra's hand still resting over mine.
I thought about the woman who had walked into Corinne's living room six weeks ago believing she was building a family.
I didn't feel sorry for her.
She had done everything right with the information she had.
She had loved someone and trusted someone and paid for it in the most literal way possible.
But she had also walked out.
She had kept her hands steady on the wheel all the way home.
She had picked up the phone when a stranger named Dani called.
And she had not, for a single moment, handed over the card.
The baby moved — a small flutter, the first real one I'd felt.
I put my hand on my stomach and felt it again.
"Hey," Petra said softly.
"Was that—"
"Yes," I said.
She pressed her lips together and looked at the ceiling for a moment in the way people do when they're trying not to cry.
I didn't try.
I let the tears come quietly, sitting at my own desk, in my own agency, in the life I had built and kept and would keep still.
It was mine.
All of it.
It had always been mine.
---
Some people spend years building a life, only to discover the person beside them was never really building it with them.
Ava's story is about what it means to finally see clearly — and to choose yourself, and your child, even when it costs everything else.
Have you ever trusted someone completely, only to realize the person you thought you knew wasn't real?
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