Chapter 14
Chapter Fourteen
SEBASTIAN
Marisa asks to meet in person. No phone, no scanned documents, and no summary over email. Just that, and an address.
I know before I walk through the door that whatever is waiting for me is going to take something from me I'll never get back.
The office belongs to no one I know. It's a temporary space downtown, rented under a company name I don't recognize. Marisa is already there when I arrive, standing beside a narrow conference table with a folder closed beneath one hand.
“Mr. Austen,” she says. No greeting. No wasted softness.
Good. If she's kind to me, I may not survive it.
“Marisa.”
She looks at my face for one second too long. “You should sit down.”
That's the first blow. I don't sit. “Show me.”
Her mouth tightens, but she opens the folder. The first page is a printed message thread. My mother’s name is at the top, and Katrina’s is beneath it.
For a second, my mind rejects it. Not the possibility.
I've known for days that Janine’s fingerprints were on this.
I've felt them everywhere: on the hotel suite, the photographers, Katrina in my house, and Chloe’s face when she set her ring down like it burned her.
But suspicion has mercy. It leaves a little room to breathe. Proof doesn't.
Marisa turns the page. “It comes in two parts.”
I look down.
Transition strategy.
The words sit there in clean black type, formatted like a board proposal.
Timeline. Media beats. Risk management. Asset positioning.
My wife’s destruction, arranged in bullet points.
Katrina at launch. Suite photographs. Pregnancy speculation.
Domestic instability. Chloe withdrawal. Public sympathy shift. Partnership stabilization.
I read the same line three times before it makes sense: Install Katrina as primary Austen public partner.
My hand closes around the edge of the table.
Marisa speaks quietly. “The payments ran through the family-trust LLC. From there, to Katrina’s management, to a consultant, and then out to the photographers and social accounts.”
I hear her. I understand every word. Still, my eyes stay on my mother’s message.
Chloe lacks the platform and reproductive reliability to serve the long-term image. K.H. is a safer investment.
Something tears inside me so violently I almost look down to see if there's blood. Reproductive reliability. My mother wrote that about my wife.
My Chloe, who used to sit on the bathroom floor with pregnancy tests lined up beside her like tiny white prayers. Chloe, who laughed too brightly the second time because the alternative was falling apart before we even reached the doctor.
The room contracts.
Marisa lays out more pages. Screenshots.
Emails. An attached calendar. Katrina asking whether the bump photos would look “too obvious.” My mother replying that obvious was useful if people were already hungry to believe it.
Hungry to believe my wife could be replaced.
Hungry to believe I'd already chosen someone else.
God.
I see Chloe in that upstairs lounge at the theater, her dress wrinkled from my hands, her eyes wet and wary as she told me it didn't fix anything. She was right. I'd been holding only the smallest piece of the damage.
“I thought they took advantage of the chaos,” I say. My voice sounds wrong. Too calm. Too far away.
Marisa watches me. “They built it.”
I nod once. There's no surprise in me now. Surprise belongs to people who still have some innocent version of the world to lose.
“Second part,” I say.
Marisa doesn't move. That's the second blow.
“Marisa.”
“This is not a medical conclusion,” she says. “I need you to understand that before I show you. Causation is for doctors. Criminal findings are for prosecutors. What I have is documentation of intent, payments, and timing.”
My skin goes cold. “What timing?”
She turns another section toward me. Dates. At first, that's all I see. Columns of dates. Invoices. Phone logs. Calendar entries. My mother’s messages. Three clusters highlighted in pale yellow. Then my mind catches up.
The first cluster is four years ago. The week Chloe called me from the guest bathroom, crying too hard to speak, a test clutched in one hand.
The week I lifted her onto the kitchen counter because her knees were shaking.
The week I kissed her stomach like a fool and whispered to someone too small to hear me.
Beside it is an invoice. A private specialist, outside the ordinary channels, someone to watch over Chloe through the whole pregnancy and answer the phone at any hour.
Chloe hadn't gone looking for her. Janine had arranged it, pressed the name into Chloe’s hand like a blessing, said she'd already had the woman vetted and that a first grandchild deserved every advantage.
She only wanted to help, she said. Chloe had cried.
No one in my family had ever made her feel so wanted.
She followed every instruction to the letter.
The appointments, the regimen she was told to keep to, the things she was told to take and the things she was told to stop.
She did it perfectly, because she wanted the baby more than she wanted to breathe.
The invoice is paid by an entity tied to Janine. The name on it answered to Janine. Chloe never knew any of it.
Beneath that is a park emergency I'd forgotten until this moment. No, not forgotten. Buried. A “surprise” ride malfunction that pulled me away from Chloe’s first early appointment.
It turned out to be nothing, just a sensor issue solved before I arrived.
Chloe went without me. I told myself there'd be other appointments.
Marisa turns the page.
Second cluster. The pregnancy we made no announcements about. We barely said it out loud, even to each other. Chloe bought a pair of impossibly small yellow socks and hid them in my dresser because she said hope worked better when it had a place to live.
A manufactured family crisis. My mother in tears over a trust dispute that didn't exist. Three days of calls.
Three days of Chloe trying to be gracious while her blood pressure climbed and her smile went brittle.
Another invoice from the same specialist, the one Chloe had kept after the first loss, the steady hand she swore had helped her through it, the person she believed was on her side.
Another change to what Chloe had been told to take.
A “refinement,” the notes call it, made without a word to the doctor actually managing her pregnancy.
Chloe had mentioned it to me once, that her specialist preferred to keep her own care separate, that too many hands only caused confusion.
It had sounded reasonable. It had sounded like someone who knew what she was doing.
Another message from my mother: Pressure increases compliance. Keep S. occupied.
I can't breathe.
Marisa’s voice is softer now. “There’s one more.”
The third cluster is the one that nearly ended us long before Katrina ever touched my chest in front of a camera. Chloe've been terrified from the beginning. Not excited first. Terrified. She stood in our bedroom with the test in her hand and said, “I don't know how to survive wanting this again.”
I told her we'd survive it together.
Then my mother began calling. Problems at the park.
Problems with donors. Problems with my father’s memorial foundation.
Always urgent, always emotional enough that ignoring her felt cruel.
I left rooms. I stepped into hallways. I told Chloe, “Give me five minutes,” and came back twenty-five minutes later to find her staring at nothing.
I remember her asking me once, small and tired, “Does she always have to need you right now?”
I kissed her forehead and said, “It’s just a bad week.” A bad week.
The page blurs. Another consult with the specialist. Another renewal of the regimen, delivered quietly to our door.
Paid. Approved. Tracked. Every bit of it chosen by a woman who answered to my mother, and taken in good faith by a wife who thought that, at last, someone in my family was helping her hold on.
And then, in my mother’s own words: If nature will not correct the mismatch, stress may help.
The sound that leaves me is not human. I don't remember standing. I remember the chair hitting the wall behind me. I remember the folder sliding off the table and striking the floor with a flat, obscene slap. Papers spill across the carpet.
Marisa says my name. I can't answer.
The room is too small.
Marisa’s hand closes around my forearm. Firm, grounding, professional. “Sebastian.”
I look at her hand because if I look anywhere else I may start breaking things and never stop.
“She was in our house,” I say. My voice is barely there. Marisa doesn't speak. “My mother sat at our table. She drank coffee in Chloe’s kitchen. She asked how Chloe was feeling.”
The memory opens with cruel precision. Janine in pale silk. Chloe wrapped in a cardigan, tired but trying. My mother touching her shoulder and telling her she needed to take better care of herself. Telling her she was so glad Chloe had finally found someone she could trust.
I bend at the waist. For one terrible second, I think I'm going to be sick.
Marisa lets go and steps back. She gives me that much dignity. Or maybe she simply knows there's no comfort for this.
There are children I never held because my mother looked at my wife and saw an obstacle. Not grandchildren. Not family. Obstacles.
I press both hands to the table and stare down at the scattered pages.
Chloe’s face comes to me in pieces. Her smile the day I met her, kneeling in a princess dress beside a crying child.
Her hand in mine at our wedding, trembling only after the ceremony when no one could see.
Her eyes after the first loss, still trying to reassure me.
Her body curled into mine after the second, silent except for the way she kept gripping my shirt. Her voice after the third: “I’m sorry.”
I should've ripped the world apart for her then.
Instead, I let the world into our home. I let my mother stay.
I let peace matter more than truth, more than instinct, more than the woman I loved.
I kept telling myself Janine was difficult, controlling.
I didn't let myself imagine evil because evil would've required action. And I was so good at postponing action.
My wife paid for that.
I sink into the chair I refused earlier. There's no grace in it. My knees simply stop being reliable.
“How certain?” I ask.
Marisa crouches to gather the pages, slow and careful. “Of the documented intent? Very. Of the payments and timing? Very. Of medical causation, I can't say. No one could, now. The practitioner is a ghost. Almost as if they didn't exist. That was the point of doing it this way.”
I close my eyes. My mother found a woman Chloe would trust, put her in Chloe’s path, and paid her to steer the one part of Chloe’s care no other doctor was watching.
Then she engineered the conditions, the stress, the isolation, the timing, she hoped would finish it.
And it may have worked. Every time, it had looked like nothing.
The kind of quiet, unexplained loss that doctors file under bad luck and no one thinks to question.
That was the mercy of it, for her. Nothing to autopsy.
Nothing to prove. Just a body that kept failing and a wife who kept apologizing for it.
Once is horror. Three times is a world I no longer understand.
I press my thumb and forefinger into my eyes until sparks flare behind the darkness.
I want to call Chloe. I want to drive to Jessica’s and fall at my wife’s feet and tell her everything, every ugly word, every page, every date.
I want to beg forgiveness for failures I didn't even know had names yesterday.
But this can't become another ambush she has to survive because my grief is loud.
She deserves the truth whole. She deserves it first. She deserves me steady enough to deliver it without making her comfort me.
So I breathe. Once. Again. The air feels like broken glass.
On the floor, one loose page has landed faceup near my shoe. A message from Janine to Katrina.
Once Chloe leaves, he will come around. Men always choose legacy when grief becomes inconvenient.
I pick it up. For a moment, the paper trembles in my hand. Then it goes still.
I place the page back in the folder. “I’m going to end this,” I say. My voice is quiet. Clean. “All of it.”
Marisa closes the folder and holds it against her chest. “And Chloe?"
I look up at Marisa. The knot in my throat threatens to choke me. When I tell her, it's going to devastate her. It will be one more thing I didn't protect her from.
"I'll tell her."
And then I'll spend the rest of my life making sure no one or nothing ever harms my wife again.