47. Chapter Forty-Seven
Chapter Forty-Seven
Ava
True to his word, King Alexander ensures the prosecution process for my mother and Raul moves ahead smoothly and legally. We hear rumblings of them trying to intimidate witnesses or bribe judges, but nothing changes their slow march to justice.
I don’t attend a single day of Raul’s trial, but Stephen and I do pop a bottle of champagne the day my ex-husband is convicted of his crimes. Petty? Maybe. But I was celebrating my freedom as much as anything. Raul can’t touch me ever again.
Today, Stephen is testifying against my mother, who is facing multiple charges related to her most violent schemes—criminal solicitation and conspiracy along with aiding and abetting.
My whole family is here, sitting on the prosecutor’s side, trying to send a message to her and to Bellerive society.
The only person sitting on her side of the courtroom is my dad, and he’s been on his phone for most of the proceedings. Mom must have a lot of dirt on him, too, because I don’t think it’s love that brought him to the courtroom every day.
Celia Tucker’s reign is over. Her children no longer condone or support the things she’s done—not that we ever truly did, but we turned away from too much, excused things we shouldn’t have, failed to ask questions that needed to be vocalized. We were complicit. Not anymore.
At the start of Stephen’s testimony, the prosecutor doesn’t shy away from the role he played for my mother, going through everything he did in detail.
Stephen didn’t want any of his testimony to be a surprise for me, so he’s been doling out his crimes in late-night increments.
Some of his reveals have been hard to hear, because of the positions my mother put him in but also because she used his family as leverage when he wouldn’t comply.
She’d threaten to get one of his parents fired or deem them unhireable to all her socialite friends, which would have put more financial pressure on them.
The depths she’d go to in order to get whatever she wanted were limitless.
My mom’s behavior, which seemed harmless to me as a kid, was actually terribly sinister.
Once Mom’s defense lawyer starts questioning Stephen, I grow tense, and Ember, who’s sitting on one side of me, grips my hand in solidarity.
“He’ll do great,” Ember whispers.
“You and Celia Tucker’s youngest daughter are currently in a relationship, is that true?” the defense lawyer asks.
“Yes,” Stephen says.
“And at the time this relationship started, she was married, is that also correct?”
“Yes,” Stephen says.
“How did you two reconnect?”
“I run the Bellerive division of Tucker Securities, and Raul Santos hired us to protect Ava Tucker and Landon Foster.”
“Your son?”
“Yes,” Stephen says.
The lawyer skirts around Landon’s paternity, probably because of my mother’s role in the cover-up, but he goes after Stephen for our affair and his conflict of interest as someone employed by my husband.
Each question causes anger to bubble in me at how bad he’s trying to make Stephen look.
None of this has anything to do with my mother’s crimes. Stephen isn’t on trial.
“He’s trying to discredit him,” Nathaniel whispers to me from my other side. “Stephen’s handling it well.”
“You and Ava Tucker were together before when she was much younger, is that correct?”
“We started a relationship when Ava was eighteen, yes,” Stephen says.
Take that! I want to yell. I was legal. Although I hated Stephen’s restraint back then, I’m thankful for it now.
“That would have made you twenty-six?”
“Yes,” Stephen says.
“If your eighteen-year-old sister had dated a twenty-six-year-old man, would you have been okay with that?”
Stephen hesitates, but his shuttered expression never changes.
“It seems to me you have a history of questionable choices,” the defense says, when Stephen doesn’t answer right away.
“Objection,” the prosecution says. “The defense is adding commentary. Mr. Foster’s dating choices are not on trial.”
The defense attorney doesn’t miss a beat, just continues trying to draw Stephen’s character into question.
But Stephen keeps his cool, refuting anything outrageous with a calm correction.
His skill on the stand probably comes from the years he spent as a police officer.
Testifying in court isn’t new to him, and neither is having his behavior or findings scrutinized.
Those were all points Stephen raised to me whenever I’d get nervous, worry that something could go wrong and nullify his immunity.
The only person going to jail will be my mother. That’s the only outcome I’ll accept.
The questioning by the defense team seems to go on forever, digging into every little detail, testing Stephen’s memory over and over. But Stephen never wavers, never shows a hint of unease beyond the question about his sister.
When he’s finally allowed to step down, he heads straight out of the courtroom, and I scoot around Ember and Gage to follow him.
I find him sitting on one of the benches in the wide, high-ceilinged hallway of the courthouse, his head in his hands. I take the seat beside him, and I lay my palm between his shoulders, and I press a kiss to his temple.
“You were great,” I say.
“I’m glad they aren’t just relying on my testimony,” he says. “They made me look pretty terrible. Untrustworthy. Questionable morals.”
“The prosecution standing up again at the end and asking if my mom had ever threatened you to get you to comply was a good move. Made you sympathetic again.”
“Maybe,” he says with a small nod. “Hard to tell sometimes when it’s just one judge and not a jury. Regular people are often easier to read.”
“You did your part,” I say, leaning against him. “We’ll just have to see if all of this was enough.”
Once all the testimony is over, the judge doesn’t take long to render her decision. My whole family piles into the courtroom again, but this time, Stephen sits beside me, our hands joined.
After each count, the judge reads her decision, and each guilty is bittersweet. Had all of us paid more attention sooner, others might not have suffered. We might not have suffered. Even her version of protection was toxic.
“I wish it hadn’t come to this,” Gage says after Mom is led out of the courtroom, and we’re filing out the doors into the sunshine. “But after everything I heard in there, a guilty verdict seems like justice.”
“Amen,” Nathaniel says, squinting into the sun. “It’ll be nice to no longer have to wonder what she’s up to and who she’s going to hurt next.”
I lean into Stephen, and he puts an arm around me, drawing me close.
Nathaniel’s right. No longer having my mother’s or Raul’s influence hanging over my head is a fresh start, a chance to remake my life into something I never knew I could have.
The only direction I’m looking from now on is forward because I’m sure the best is yet to come.