Chapter 4: The Longest Night
The hospital was forty minutes from Sterling Ridge.
I counted contractions the entire way.
The paramedic beside me, a young woman named Rosa, kept her hand on my wrist and talked to me in a steady, unhurried voice about nothing in particular — the route, the weather, the fact that the hospital had just renovated its maternity ward.
I understood what she was doing.
I was grateful for it.
"First baby?" she asked.
"Yes."
"Scared?"
I thought about the bathroom floor.
The locked door.
Julian's shadow beneath the gap.
"Not anymore," I said.
Rosa smiled.
She didn't ask what I meant.
Diana was waiting outside the emergency entrance when we arrived.
She had driven separately, which meant she had left Sterling Ridge within minutes of executing the warrant.
She was still in the same dark jacket she'd worn for the operation, her badge clipped to her belt, a paper coffee cup in each hand.
She set them both down the moment she saw the stretcher.
"How bad?"
"Thirty-four weeks.
Contractions four minutes apart." Rosa rattled off the rest to the receiving team.
Diana walked beside the stretcher as they moved me inside.
"The baby?"
"Moving.
Strong heartbeat the whole way."
Diana exhaled through her nose.
She pressed her lips together for a moment.
"Good," she said.
"That's good."
They moved me into a room and the medical team took over.
Diana stayed in the corridor.
Through the window in the door I could see her on her phone, pacing the short length of the hallway, her free hand pressed flat against the wall.
The doctor who examined me was a compact, precise woman named Dr.
Ellison.
She had the manner of someone who had delivered difficult news so many times that she had learned to make her face completely neutral until she had something definite to say.
She had something definite to say within ten minutes.
"The baby is early but positioned well.
Your blood pressure is elevated, which concerns me more than the timing.
We're going to monitor you closely.
If things progress naturally and your pressure stabilizes, we let it happen.
If not, we intervene."
"What does intervene mean?"
"It means we make sure both of you are safe.
That's the only goal in this room tonight."
I nodded.
She made a note on her tablet and looked up.
"Is there someone you want us to call?"
I thought about that.
Not Julian.
Not Eleanor.
Not anyone named Sterling.
"There's a woman in the corridor.
Diana Cruz.
She can come in."
Dr.
Ellison nodded and left.
Diana came in two minutes later.
She pulled a chair to the side of the bed and sat down without being asked.
She didn't say anything immediately.
She just looked at me with the expression she used when she was deciding how much to tell someone.
I knew that expression well.
"How bad is it?" I asked.
"The estate?"
"Yes."
"The servers were intact.
Nobody had time to wipe anything." She set her coffee cup on the windowsill.
"The physical records in the main office were organized, which actually made it faster.
Someone kept very clean books."
"Eleanor," I said.
"She always kept clean books.
She just kept them for the wrong companies."
"We found three filing cabinets of vendor contracts.
At least thirty entities we hadn't identified yet."
I closed my eyes for a moment.
Thirty more.
On top of the nineteen I had already documented.
"Julian's signatures?"
"On the ones we've reviewed so far.
Yes."
A contraction moved through me.
I breathed through it.
Diana waited.
"He knew," I said when it passed.
"He told me he didn't.
I wanted to believe him."
"I know."
"He signed every one of them."
"Audrey." Diana leaned forward slightly.
"You did everything right.
You flagged it.
You documented it.
You waited longer than anyone asked you to because you were trying to be fair to someone who did not deserve it."
I looked at the ceiling.
"I was trying to be fair to my child's father."
"I know that too."
Another contraction.
Longer this time.
Rosa appeared in the doorway, checked the monitor, made a quiet note, and left again.
Diana stayed.
At some point in the next hour she went to find more coffee and came back with a sandwich she had apparently convinced someone at the nurses' station to produce.
She set it on the tray beside me without comment.
I didn't eat it.
But I looked at it, and something about the simple fact of it — the ordinary, unheroic gesture of a sandwich appearing when I hadn't asked — made my throat tighten in a way that the locked door and the marble floor and the contractions had not.
"Diana."
"Yes."
"What did Seraphina say?
After I was outside."
Diana was quiet for a moment.
"She said you had planned the whole thing.
That you married Julian to get access to the family."
"I know that part.
I heard that part."
"After that." Diana set her cup down.
"She said something else.
Something the officers flagged."
I turned my head toward her.
"She said the accounts weren't Julian's idea."
I waited.
"She said he was told to sign.
That he didn't understand what he was signing at first, and by the time he did, it was too late to stop."
The monitor beeped steadily beside me.
"She said whose idea it was?"
Diana met my eyes.
"She named someone we weren't expecting."
The door opened before she could say the name.
Dr.
Ellison came back in, checked the monitor, looked at me with that neutral face, and said the words that pushed everything else out of the room entirely.
May you like
"We're moving.
It's time."
