Chapter 14: (END)

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Back when this started — back when Phoebe used her status as the deacon’s girlfriend to livestream my humiliation and rally strangers to destroy my room — I had nothing. No name, no leverage, no one standing behind me. She held all the cards and she knew it.

Now I was Mrs. Hadley. And I wanted to see who held the cards today.

The police arrived within twenty minutes. Solid evidence of poisoning, a pregnant victim, hospital records, the bowl still reeking on the floor where Phoebe had dropped it. They detained her on the spot, though given her condition they notified her family before processing the paperwork.

Vaughn arrived at the manor with his collar crooked and his prayer beads swinging. Phoebe threw herself into his arms and buried her face in his chest, but her eyes — visible over his shoulder — were pure fury, aimed at me.

“I’m a daughter-in-law of the Hadleys,” she announced, loud enough for the officers to hear, “and if I say I’m not going to prison, I’m not going!”

The officers exchanged a look. They’d heard this kind of speech before.

Vaughn disentangled himself from Phoebe and turned to me, his face arranged into an expression of wounded family honor.

“Freya, we’re family. You don’t have to behave this way toward us.”

Family. The word sat between us, absurd and offensive. This man had tried to buy my baby’s life with a fifty-thousand-dollar check. His girlfriend had poured boiling water at my face, tried to push me down a staircase, and just attempted to poison my unborn child. Family.

“I’m your sister-in-law,” I said. “And I have the right to discipline you.”

Then I slapped him.

Open palm. Full force. The sound bounced off the manor’s stone walls. Vaughn staggered sideways, more from shock than from pain, and for a second he just stood there, jaw hanging, hand pressed to his cheek, processing the impossible fact that someone had hit him.

The shock curdled into rage. His fist clenched, his arm pulled back, and he would have swung if Conrad hadn’t caught his wrist mid-motion.

𝖳𝗵e 𝖻е𝘀𝘁 r𝘦a𝗱𝗂ո𝘨 𝘦xpеr𝗶𝘦ոсe o𝗇 𝘨𝖺l𝗇ovе𝗹𝗌.co𝗆
Conrad didn’t grab it. He held it. Gently, almost. With just enough pressure to make the bones grind.

“Conrad…” Vaughn’s voice came out strained, thin. “I’m your brother.”

Conrad looked at him with the flat patience of someone doing long division in his head and not liking the answer.

“I don’t need such a useless brother.”

Winston and Cecilia tried to intervene — tried to smooth, to mediate, to invoke family loyalty. Conrad shut them down with a sentence: “If anyone in this room defends him again, I’ll consider it a personal insult.”

The room emptied of allies.

What followed took weeks, not minutes, but the outcome was swift and total. Conrad severed the business collaboration with his father’s company — a partnership that had sustained Vaughn’s lifestyle, funded his parish activities, and kept Winston’s remaining enterprises afloat. The cut was surgical. Clean. Devastating.

Winston stopped defending Vaughn. There was nothing left to defend him with.

And Vaughn, stripped of family funding, discovered what his life looked like without the Hadley name attached to a bank account. A deacon who only recites prayers, who can’t afford the robes he preaches in, whose congregation watches him arrive in a dented sedan instead of a Lincoln — how long can he remain respectable? How long before the pews start emptying?

* * *

Months later, I gave birth. A boy. My third son.

I held him in the hospital bed, his tiny fist wrapped around my index finger, and felt a pang of something that surprised me: disappointment. Mild, irrational, quickly buried. I’d wanted a girl. A daughter. Someone to dress in ridiculous outfits and argue with about curfews and watch grow into someone fiercer than me.

Three boys. The universe had a sense of humor, and it wasn’t subtle.

Conrad arrived with flowers and an expression of transparent pride, and I handed him his son, and the disappointment dissolved because the baby had Conrad’s chin and my eyes and a grip strong enough to crush a finger, and that was enough. More than enough.

On my way out of the maternity ward, walking slowly, still sore, leaning on Conrad’s arm, I passed the emergency room.

A woman was being rushed through the double doors on a stretcher. Disheveled hair. Hospital gown already stained. Bruises visible on her arms, her neck, the side of her face. Pregnant. Far along.

The nurses spoke in low voices, but hospital corridors carry sound.

“They say her husband hit her in the face. She’s covered in bruises.”

“Poor thing. Her husband doesn’t work, just spends his time reciting prayers, and even so, with her big belly, she has to go out to earn a living.”

“I heard her first child was also a girl. Maybe this baby won’t make it…”

I stopped walking. Conrad’s arm tensed against mine.

Through the glass panel of the ER doors, I caught a glimpse of her face. Swollen, discolored, barely recognizable. But I recognized it.

Phoebe.

The stretcher disappeared around a corner. The doors swung shut.

I stood there for what felt like a long time but was probably only seconds. A nurse brushed past me. A monitor beeped somewhere down the hall. Conrad waited, saying nothing, letting me decide.

I could have gone in. I could have called Cecilia, called a lawyer, called someone. I could have intervened, the way Phoebe once intervened for me in that library, freshman year, when she was brave and kind and hadn’t yet learned to be anything else.

But I’m not a saint. I’ve never claimed to be. And this — the bruises, the stretcher, the husband who prays with the same hands he uses to hit — this is where Phoebe’s choices led her. Not mine. Hers.

I turned away from the ER doors.

Conrad fell into step beside me. The hallway stretched ahead, bright and long, and somewhere in the parking lot my three sons were waiting in a car with heated seats and a driver who’d keep them safe.

The bright future that awaits us is still unfolding. I intend to walk toward it with my eyes open.

I did not look back.

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THE END

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Message from Noa: Have a great time dear readers. God loves you and Noa wishes you all the best. (˵ •̀ ᴗ – ˵ ) ✧

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