Chapter 70: The Trial Begins
The hearing began that morning, the first real court date since the case had been filed, and Harrison arrived at the courthouse like a man walking into a party thrown in his honor.
Reporters were already gathered outside, more of them than he’d expected, cameras lifted the moment his car door opened.
A few voices called out questions he had no intention of answering, his name tangled up with words like "fraud" and "embezzlement" in ways that would have rattled a smaller man.
He laughed climbing the steps, straightening his jacket, chin up, the picture of a man untouched by any of it. "A nineteen-year-old thinks he can ruin me."
Beside him, Victor Whitfield didn’t look up from the folder in his hands. Small, precise, gray at the temples, the kind of lawyer who’d never once needed to raise his voice in a courtroom to win one, and never once needed to raise it outside of one either.
"Say nothing to them," Whitfield said, moving briskly, not slowing to let the reporters catch up. "Whatever you say out here, they’ll print it without the context, and context is the only thing standing between you and a headline you can’t undo."
Devon trailed a few steps behind, checking his phone for the second time in as many minutes. Nothing yet.Has he convinced her not to come?
Not yet. Meeting him again now.
He read it twice before following the others in, jaw tight, and didn’t like the shape of the silence sitting underneath it. Not yet wasn’t a no. Today, of all days, wasn’t built for anything less than certainty.
Inside, the gallery had filled faster than usual, word of the case having spread further than Devon would have liked.
Harrison spotted Evelyn already seated near the front, and something in his chest eased at the sight of her, the tightness in his shoulders loosening for the first time since he’d stepped out of the car.
She hadn’t told him she’d be here. He assumed it meant something, that she’d finally decided to stand where people could see her standing with him, even if only from a gallery seat.
A judge in the room, even one just watching, said something to everyone else in it, whether or not she meant it to. He allowed himself a small nod in her direction, satisfied, already composing the version of this morning he’d tell people later.
She didn’t return it. She hadn’t come for him, and hadn’t come to be seen at all,
Liam and Rowena arrived a few minutes later, cutting through a side entrance to avoid the last of the cameras.
Grace was supposed to meet them by the doors, fifteen minutes before the hearing, the way they’d planned it the night before over the kitchen table at Evelyn’s house, coffee going cold between them while they walked through exactly how the morning was supposed to go.
She wasn’t there.Rowena checked her phone, then checked it again a minute later, as though the message might appear the second time if it hadn’t the first. "No message. Nothing."
"She’ll come," Liam said, eyes on the entrance, watching every face that came through the door and wasn’t hers.
"You sound very certain."I’m not." He didn’t look away. "I just don’t have anything better to be right now.
They went in without her, the space where she should have been standing walking in with them anyway, impossible to ignore even empty.
Whitfield opened without wasted motion, laying out dates and documents in a voice so calm it made the accusations sound like arithmetic, inevitable rather than argued.
A pattern of behavior dressed up as a cause. He used the word "obsession" once, early, and let it sit there doing its work for the rest of the morning without needing to repeat it, the way a good lie only needed saying once if it was said correctly.
Patricia pushed back where she could, exactly as promised, unshaken by anything he put in front of her, objecting twice, redirecting once, her voice never once rising to match his calm.
But with Grace absent and no witness seated yet to anchor the human cost of any of it, the case read thin against what Whitfield was selling the room, and the judge’s face gave away nothing, which today felt worse than if it had given away everything.
Liam watched the clock above the bench and thought about a woman who hadn’t shown, the minutes stacking up into something that felt less like patience now and more like waiting for a verdict that hadn’t been read yet.
The night before, in the same café booth, Marcus had finally told Damien the whole story, or enough of it that it counted as the truth in every way that still mattered to him.
Not everything. Enough. The lawsuit. What it would cost Grace to stand up in that courtroom and say the things she meant to say. What it would cost Damien, carrying her name and his own through whatever came after, every headline, every stranger who’d decide they knew something about him just from knowing whose son he was.
Damien hadn’t slept much after that. He’d sat at his kitchen table until well past midnight, phone in his hand, turning the whole conversation over.
By morning, he’d stopped pretending.
He called her three blocks from the courthouse, before he could talk himself out of it, the phone ringing against his ear louder than it should have in the quiet street.
Grace stopped on the sidewalk, coat buttoned against the chill, and stared at the screen through three rings, her chest tightening with something dangerously close to hope, because he hadn’t called her willingly in months.
She answered on the fourth ring, voice already unsteady. "Damien?"Don’t go in there.
The words landed hard what how did you know grace was surprised. I have my ways "Damien, I have to."
"You don’t." His voice cracked, somewhere between anger and something rawer underneath it. Just Don’t go.
"I have to do this."Why? For what? So people can pick apart your whole life in front of strangers? So I have to hear my own mother’s name on the news every time someone wants to talk about Harrison Hale?"
His breathing had gone ragged on the other end, the words coming faster than he seemed able to control. "You don’t have to be the one who does this."
Grace closed her eyes, the courthouse steps only a few blocks ahead of her now, close enough to see the last of the morning crowd thinning through the doors.