Chapter 5 - The Reunion and the Threat
Twenty minutes later, I was sitting in a plush velvet armchair in the west wing nursery, holding my son Leo tightly against my chest. He was sleeping peacefully, his tiny chest rising and falling in steady, rhythmic breaths, completely oblivious to the fact that his mother had spent the afternoon dodging financial ruin and billionaire benefactors.
The door opened quietly, and Ethan stepped into the room, holding a small digital tablet in his hand.
"He's beautiful, Sarah," Ethan said softly, keeping his voice low so as not to wake the baby.
"Thank you," I murmured, burying my face in Leo's soft baby hair. "For bringing him here. For keeping us safe. I still feel like I'm living inside someone else's dream—or nightmare."
"It's neither," Ethan replied, walking over to stand by the window that looked out over the sparkling city skyline. "It's reality. And reality is about to get very uncomfortable for Gregory and his associates."
"What did you find out?" I asked, shifting Leo slightly to a more comfortable position.
"My security team visited Gregory’s apartment about an hour after we left Le Gabriel," Ethan said, his tone entirely flat. "They didn't find Gregory. They found a packed suitcase, a one-way ticket to the Cayman Islands, and a hard drive that he had tried to smash with a claw hammer."
My stomach dropped. "He’s running?"
"He tried to," Ethan corrected, turning around with a faint, sardonic smile. "Unfortunately for Gregory, my head of security, Vance, has a very particular set of skills when it comes to international transit hubs. Gregory was intercepted at a private airstrip in Teterboro before his charter plane could even clear the tarmac."
I stared at him in stunned silence. "You had him intercepted?"
"Sarah, nobody steals from my real estate portfolio, uses my tenant subsidies to fund a black-market meat ring, and skips town on a private jet while I'm eating osso buco," Ethan said calmly. "Gregory is currently sitting in a secure holding room down in the Financial District, waiting for me to decide whether I want to hand him over to the federal marshals or let the New York State tax division handle him."
"Hand him to the feds," I said without a single second of hesitation. "He ruined lives, Mr. Hayes. Not just mine—there were twenty other servers and kitchen staff at Le Gabriel who had their rent checks bounce because Gregory systematically shaved hours off every single payroll cycle."
Ethan walked over, stopping a few feet away from my chair. He reached out and placed a crisp, heavy envelope on the mahogany side table next to the nursery lamp.
"Inside that envelope," Ethan said quietly, "is a certified cashier’s check for fifty thousand dollars. Back pay, statutory damages for labor violations, and a severance package from the corporate parent company that Gregory was embezzling from."
I gasped, staring at the envelope as if it were radioactive. "Fifty thousand? Mr. Hayes, I can't take this. That's—that's life-changing money, I didn't earn—"
"You earned every single penny of it by surviving, Sarah," Ethan interrupted, his voice brooking no argument. "And more importantly, you earned it by refusing to let a thief silence you over three hundred dollars."
Before I could formulate a response, my phone—resting on the side table—buzzed violently with an incoming notification.
It was an automated text message from ConEd.
“Your service has been disconnected due to non-payment.”
I looked down at the screen, a sudden wave of bitter irony washing over me. Even with fifty thousand dollars waiting in an envelope, my real-world problems were still crashing down in real time.
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Ethan noticed the shadow cross my face. He glanced at the phone screen, read the notification, and then reached down, picking up the envelope and placing it directly into my trembling hands.
"Let's go fix your electricity, Sarah," Ethan said softly, offering a hand to help me up from the armchair. "And then, tomorrow morning, we're going to open a brand-new restaurant—one where the manager actually knows how to balance a ledger and pay his staff."
