Chapter 4 - THE TABLES TURN
Richard’s face turned the color of curdled milk. “Assault? That’s absurd! I touched her arm to guide her out!”
“I was standing right here,” a neighbor’s voice called out from across the lawn. Mrs. Gable, our retired next-door neighbor who had been watering her hydrangeas, marched across the property line with her garden hose still in hand, her eyes blazing with fury. “I saw him grab her hair and throw her down the front steps like a piece of garbage! I recorded the whole thing on my phone!”
Kelsey gasped, stepping back into the foyer. “You’re all conspiring against us! Richard, do something!”
Richard had nothing left to say. The deputies moved in, their handcuffs clicking sharply as they gripped his wrists and forced him against the wall of his own illegally claimed foyer. As they hauled him out past the porch, Richard looked at me with a mixture of pleading and incandescent rage.
“Emily, please... we’re family. Don’t do this to your father.”
“My father died the moment he put his hands on me while I was carrying my husband’s child,” I said steadily, my voice cutting through the crisp morning air. “Take him away, officer. And check his briefcase—he was stealing Daniel’s corporate ledgers.”
As the cruiser doors slammed shut behind Richard, another sharp, blinding contraction ripped through my lower back. I cried out, grabbing Margaret’s arm.
“The baby,” I choked out. “He’s coming. Now.”
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Margaret didn’t hesitate. She shouted to the deputies, and within seconds, an ambulance that had been called as a precaution pulled up with sirens wailing, its medical crew rushing toward the porch with a gurney.
Kelsey stood alone in the doorway of the house, abandoned by her arrested husband, staring in absolute horror as the reality of her ruined life finally set in.
