Chapter 6 #2
He flips a page. “I already gave the detective in charge all the documentation you compiled, plus the additional documentation I did. She’s building the case from the text messages—coordinated financial exploitation of a vulnerable adult.
The fraudulent POA is a separate felony count.
The will amendment is void, but the attempt to execute it constitutes fraud.
” He sets the notebook down. “Combined with the documented manipulation campaign, she believes the prosecution has more than enough to start building the case.”
“And the will?”
“Your grandmother’s original will stands. The amendment was drafted by a disbarred attorney. It’s legally void—there’s nothing to contest and nothing to unwind. The estate is exactly where it’s always been.”
One hundred and twenty-five million dollars.
Safe. Not because I fought for the money—I fought for her—but the money is safe too, and I’m not going to pretend that doesn’t matter.
It matters because my family built it. Because my grandfather started it.
Because it represents my family’s legacy, that a con artist nearly walked out of a bank with.
His phone rings again. He checks the screen. “Rachel Kovac.” Puts her on speaker.
“Nora, Dominic.” Rachel’s voice is clipped, efficient—already three steps ahead.
“I filed the divorce petition an hour ago. Given the criminal charges, I’ve requested an emergency asset freeze on all joint accounts.
His firm’s debt situation is worse than we thought—I don’t want him liquidating anything should he make bail. ”
“How bad?” I ask.
“Roughly four million in the red. Final notices from three lenders. And he’s been skimming from your joint checking for months—spread across transactions, amounts that are easy to miss if you’re not looking for it.”
My money. My deposits. The accounts I funded from my salary and the family trusts I brought into this marriage because I believed the man I married was something other than what he is.
“Your inheritance is untouchable,” Rachel continues.
“Separate property under Illinois law—inherited assets don’t convert to marital property unless they’re commingled, and yours weren’t.
Grant gets nothing from the estate. Between the criminal charges, the debt, and the documentation you’ve assembled, I don’t anticipate a fight. ”
“He’ll try to negotiate,” I say.
“He can try.” Something close to amusement. “He’ll be negotiating from zero leverage with a pending felony and a wife who has receipts. I’ve handled his type before. They posture until they see the file. Then they plead guilty.”
She hangs up. The office goes quiet.
Dominic slides a printed page across the desk.
“I’ve filed a formal complaint with the Illinois Department of Financial and Professional Regulation regarding Sienna’s nursing license.
Abuse of her position of trust, financial exploitation, the affair with a patient’s family member—all documented.
The board will investigate, and whether or not she gets jail time, she’ll never work as a nurse or caregiver ever again. ”
I look at the page. Her name. Her license number. The clinical language of a regulatory filing that will end the career she weaponized against a ninety-one-year-old woman.
I think about her in Gran’s kitchen—the wildflowers, the honey in the tea, the devoted tilt of her head.
I think about they’ve gone to the bank and the satisfaction she couldn’t quite hide.
She thought she’d won. She thought the campaign was finished, the money was coming, and the granddaughter who loved Vivian Hargrove had been permanently edged out.
Dominic’s phone buzzes and he nods as he reads a message.
“I also pulled some strings and the detective is picking her up as we speak. The detective said they found her packing a suitcase.” As if there were somewhere to go.
As if Grant—the man whose draft will gave everything to himself and nothing to her—was going to be waiting on the other end with open arms and a split of the proceeds.
Two predators. Each conning the other. And now they’re both sitting in separate cells, and neither one is coming to save the other.
“I need to find a permanent nurse for Gran,” I say. “No agency placement. I vet them personally—references, background, everything.”
“I have a name.” Dominic opens his desk drawer and pulls out a card. “A nurse who worked with a client of mine for three years. Excellent, discreet, deeply experienced with elderly patients. I’ll connect you tonight.”
I take the card. Another piece clicking into place.
The machinery of destruction is complete—arrest, charges, divorce, regulatory complaints, every lever pulled, every wall collapsed.
What’s left now is different. Quieter. Harder in some ways, because the adrenaline is fading and what’s underneath it is the thing I’ve been holding at arm’s length since I knelt beside Gran’s wheelchair and felt her hands shake.
I have to tell her everything. Tomorrow, or the next day, whenever she’s steady enough—I have to sit across from the woman who raised me and explain that her grandson-in-law and her nurse spent eight months lying to her face.
That the visits and the peonies and the ginger broth were a performance.
That they told her I wanted to sell her house, that I forgot to call, that I was pulling away—and none of it was true. Not one word.
She’ll need to hear it from me. Not from an attorney, not from a detective, not from a stranger in a courtroom. From me.
“You should go home,” Dominic says. “Sleep, if you can. Tomorrow you see your grandmother.”
I stand. Pick up my bag. His eyes follow me to the door—steady, unhurried, the same attention he’s given everything since the day I sat in this chair and spread my evidence across his desk.
But there’s something else in his expression now.
Something I don’t have a name for yet. Something I’m not ready to look at directly, the way you can’t look at the sun but you know exactly where it is.
“Dominic.”
“Yeah.”
“Thank you.”
He nods. Once. And I leave before either of us says anything else, because I have a grandmother to get back and a marriage to bury and a life to reassemble from the wreckage, and the man in that office is a door I’m not ready to open.
But I know it’s there.