Chapter 169
< Chapter 169
CHAPTER 169
Chapter 169 – Before Birth
Brennan called her at 9 AM on a Tuesday. The message had been produced.
Celine was at her kitchen table, still in her dressing gown, holding the phone against her ear while Brennan described – in the careful language of an attorney explaining something she had already anticipated and been told about and chose not to pursue the message to Frederica, the timeline, the language.
Regardless of what the mother thinks.
Celine remembered writing it. She remembered the kitchen, the specific October light, the cup of tea she’d had cooling beside her. She remembered being brisk about it, the way she was brisk about logistical things – it was a logistical matter, that was how she had understood it at the time. Dario had a situation that required management. The management plan had seemed clear. She had written to her sister because her sister was the one person she could be brisk with about things that required management.
She had not thought, last October, that the message would appear in a court discovery file in the hands of Aveline Ashby’s attorney. She hadn’t thought about it because she hadn’t thought about Aveline Ashby as a person who would eventually have attorneys. That was the part she had difficulty reconstructing in a way that sounded reasonable even to herself.
“The message is in evidence,” Brennan said. “There’s no path that puts it out of evidence. I want you to think carefully about what your testimony looks like in light of it p>
“I know what my testimony looks like p>
“Tell me p>
Celine looked at the window. “I was managing a situation I had been given incomplete information about. Dario told me there was a previous relationship, a baby coming, a management plan for the optics. I signed the forms I was asked to sign. I wrote to my sister because I was processing something I hadn’t known about before we married p>
“The language regardless of what the mother thinks p>
“Was how I spoke about it privately. It was blunt. It was how I spoke to my sister. It wasn’t-” she paused – “it doesn’t mean I understood what the forms were doing p>
Brennan was quiet. “I believe you understand the distinction I’m about to make,” she said. “The message shows you knew the mother had preferences. You knew her preferences would potentially conflict with the plan. You knew the plan anyway. That’s not I didn’t understand the forms. That’s / understood there was a conflict and chose the plan p>
Celine said nothing.
“The question Aveline’s team will ask,” Brennan said, “is: what was the conflict? What preferences of hers were you dismissing? If you answer that question honestly, it implicates you significantly. If you answer it dishonestly, it impeaches you p>
“You’re telling me I have no good path through the testimony p>
“I’m telling you that you have a path that requires you to acknowledge something you’ve been avoiding p>
Celine looked at the tea she’d made and forgotten on the other side of the table. She knew what the conflict was. She had known in October what the conflict was – that Aveline did not know her own status was being pre-determined, that the forms were not administrative in the neutral sense, that the mother in her message to Frederica was a woman who believed, at 28 weeks pregnant, that she was in a relationship
1/3
Lera – Webnovels Romance
INSTALL
< Chapter 169
that was moving toward recognition.
She had known. She had not asked whether that belief was accurate – had not asked because Dario had given her a version of events in which Aveline was an arrangement that predated their marriage and the baby was a complication being managed, not a person with a life she was in the middle of. She had taken his version because it was more comfortable than the alternative.
The alternative was: Aveline had been lied to. Aveline had been lied to and Celine had signed the forms. She had not initiated the lie. She had not structured the exclusion. But she had made it more legible, more official, more permanent with her signature on two pieces of paper and her willingness to not ask the questions that would have required a different decision. That was the honest accounting. She had been keeping it privately since that October.
Nico came downstairs at 10:30, still in pajamas, and asked whether there was cereal.
Celine looked at him. He was 8 years old, with Dario’s eyes and her hands and a specific way of asking questions- the same careful precision, the same instinct for accuracy-that she had not recognized until recently as something he had absorbed from watching both of them. Not taught, exactly. Absorbed.
“Yes,” she said. “Top shelf p>
He got the cereal. He was quiet while he ate, in the way he had been quieter lately-since the night of the argument, the night he had heard things in the hallway he hadn’t been meant to hear. She had talked to his school counselor about it. The counselor had said children were more resilient than parents feared but also more perceptive, and that honesty at an age-appropriate level was generally better than managed
silence.
Celine had nodded and said she understood. She had said managed silence back to herself in the car afterward and understood precisely that she had been living there for four years.
“Is Dad okay?” Nico asked.
Celine looked at him. “He’s having some difficult things right now p>
Nico looked at his cereal. “Is it the baby p>
“It’s-some things related to the baby, yes. And some other things p>
“The news stuff p>
“Some of that p>
He was quiet. “Is the baby okay p>
Celine thought about Noa. She had not met Noa – had been very careful not to think of Noa as a specific person, a weight, a set of dimensions, a voice she had not heard but could imagine.
“The baby is fine,” she said. “Her mother is taking good care of her p>
Nico looked up at this. She had said her mother-not the arrangement’s mother, but her mother, the way a person said it when they were thinking about an actual child who had a mother who was taking good care of her. Nico seemed to notice something shift in the room, the way children noticed those things without having the vocabulary for them.
“Good,” he said, and went back to his cereal.
Brennan called again at 2 PM with the hearing confirmation. Aveline Ashby’s testimony was scheduled – 5 weeks out.
L
Lera – Webnovels Romance
INSTALL
2/3
< Chapter 169
Celine looked at the date on her phone. “What does my testimony do to her case p>
Brennan was quiet for a moment. “If you tell the truth about what you knew and when you knew it,” she said, “it corroborates her version of events p>
“And if I don’t p>
“Then you risk a perjury finding in a proceeding where the documentary record is already against you p>
Celine set the phone on the kitchen table. The tea was cold.
She thought about Frederica’s face when she’d sent that message – how she’d expected her sister to receive it as a logistical briefing, nothing more. She thought about Frederica’s reply, which had been a single word: Really. Not That’s awful. Not is she okay? Just Really. Because Frederica had known, even then, that regardless of what the mother thinks was not logistical. And she had said/Really in the way someone said it when they were choosing to believe the smallest possible interpretation of an ugly thing, because the alternative was the kind of conversation that required them to act differently. They had all been doing that. Celine had been doing it too.
“Tell me what truthful testimony looks like,” she said.
Brennan told her. Celine listened.
Outside the window, the garden was losing its leaves in the specific disordered way of early winter – not one at a time, but in handfuls, whole sections at once. She had five weeks.
– End of chapter-
Lera – Webnovels Romance
INSTALL
3/3
Tai Jun
Tai Jun is a dreamer and storyteller who believes the sky is never the limit. He spends most of his time with his friend Lian, chasing new horizons and crafting tales that soar beyond boundaries.