Damien turned to sprint toward the side door, but four plainclothes officers from the District Attorney’s office were already waiting for him in the shadows.
“Damien Finch,” the lead officer said, stepping forward. “You are under arrest for attempted murder, insurance fraud, criminal conspiracy, and filing false statements.”
“No,” he screamed, thrashing as they grabbed his arms. “She planned this whole thing, she wanted to keep all the money for herself!”
Eloise looked at him with the same pity one feels for a piece of trash that is finally being hauled away to the dump.
“I planned to survive, Damien,” she said coolly. “You are the one who planned to murder your wife and your daughter.”
The officers dragged him toward the exit.
Damien fought, lost all of his composure, shouted vulgar insults, and desperately begged the wealthy businessmen in the room to defend him, but nobody moved a muscle to help him.
The silver pen lay abandoned on the floor, rolling until it stopped right in front of the empty, white coffin.
Wendy tried to claim that she had no idea what was happening, but the lawyer immediately presented physical copies of messages, wire transfers, and flight reservations that were booked in both of their names. They had tickets to fly out to Europe just three days after the funeral was supposed to have finished.
The entire cathedral understood the truth instantly.
It had never been a tragedy.
It had been nothing more than pure, calculated greed.
When Damien was finally dragged away in handcuffs, Eloise felt her legs begin to give way, but Harris caught her before she could hit the ground.
“It is all over now,” he whispered to her.
But Eloise gently shook her head.
“No,” she replied, looking toward the future. “It is actually just beginning.”
Two weeks later, her daughter was born via a quick, successful cesarean section in a private hospital in the center of the city.
They named her Hope.
Eloise cried when she heard her daughter’s first, healthy cry, not because she was weak, but because for the first time in many years, she was not just struggling to survive her own fear. She was finally receiving the life she had fought so hard to protect.
Harris stood in the doorway of the recovery room, his eyes filled with happy tears, holding a small, stuffed toy he had bought without having any idea what a newborn baby might actually need.
“I have to admit, I have absolutely no idea how to be a grandfather,” he confessed with a sheepish smile.
Eloise, exhausted but genuinely smiling for the first time in ages, looked back at him.
“To be fair, I never really learned how to be a daughter, so I think we can learn this together,” she said.
Months later, Damien was held in a high-security facility while awaiting his trial. Wendy agreed to cooperate with the prosecution in exchange for a lighter sentence, and she provided enough evidence to absolutely bury him: digital messages where he calculated the exact fall time, search histories related to hypothermia, long phone calls with a corrupt financial advisor, and even creepy photos of Eloise sleeping that he had taken just days before the attempted murder.
His bank accounts were frozen by the authorities.
All of his business partners abandoned him as soon as the news hit the front pages.
His last name no longer opened any doors for him, and he became a pariah in the world he once thought he owned.
