Chapter 8 - The Grand Jury
By late November, the trees around Cedar Hill had dropped their leaves, leaving the stark, grey branches of the oaks standing like sentinels against the cold Georgia sky.
I was eight and a half months pregnant now. My belly was high and heavy, forcing me to walk with a slow, deliberate sway, but the contractions had ceased entirely under Dr. Chen’s care and the quiet, peaceful routine of the estate.
Every morning, I sat at the small mahogany desk in the morning room—the same room where Celeste had once forced me to sit during Rowan’s video calls—and reviewed the operational accounts for the new Armand Family Foundation, a non-profit entity Rowan and I had established to support maternal health clinics in rural counties.
The forty-two thousand dollars recovered from Celeste’s St. Thomas account had been donated directly to the clinic where Dr. Chen practiced, funding three new home-monitoring units for high-risk pregnancies in the district.
On the third Tuesday of November, Rowan returned from the federal courthouse in downtown Atlanta at four in the afternoon.
He walked into the morning room carrying his briefcase, his face tired but clear. He set his coat over the back of a chair and sat down across from me at the small table, reaching across the blotter to take my hand.
“The grand jury returned the indictment fifteen minutes ago,” he said quietly.
I set my pen down on the ledger paper. “Which counts?”
“Wire fraud, aggravated identity theft, and grand larceny,” Rowan replied, his thumb stroking my knuckles. “Eight counts total. Her attorney tried to offer a plea agreement involving full restitution from her remaining non-voting trust shares, but the Assistant U.S. Attorney refused.”
“Why?”
“Because of the medical records,” Rowan said, his voice growing cold again. “When they reviewed the clinic logs showing she had locked you out of your iron treatments while using your name to clear eighty-six thousand dollars in fake nurse fees, the prosecutor classified it as intentional endangerment of a vulnerable person.”
I looked out the long french doors toward the garden, where the stone fountain had been drained for the winter, its basin filled with crisp, oak leaves.
“Does she have bail?” I asked softly.
“Set at two hundred and fifty thousand dollars,” Rowan said. “And David Vance informed her legal team an hour ago that the trust will not advance one dollar from her future distributions to cover the bond. She’s staying in the Fulton County facility until trial.”
I sat back in my chair, resting both hands over the heavy curve of my stomach.
For six weeks, I had thought about how I would feel when this moment came—whether I would feel vengeance, or satisfaction, or the cold triumph of a professional auditor who had proven her case.
But looking at Rowan’s tired eyes and the dark lines etched around his mouth, I felt only a vast, quiet relief. The shadow that had hung over this house since the day I moved in—the dark, suffocating presence that had made every hallway feel like a trap—was finally gone.
“How are you feeling?” I asked him softly.
May you like
Rowan looked around the small, bright room—at the white wainscoting, the soft yellow curtains, the stack of clean ledger files sitting neatly beside my teacup.
“I feel like I can finally breathe in my own house,” he whispered, leaning across the table to press his forehead against mine. “I feel like our son is going to be born in a home, not a fortress.”
