Billionaire, I Am Not Your Wife! novel Chapter 293

Chapter 280. Plea.

LOGAN

My lawyer laid the numbers out the way he always laid out numbers, flat, precise, no room left for the kind of negotiation I used to assume I could always find somewhere inside any set of facts.

“If we go to trial,” he said, “and I want to be honest with you about this, Logan, because I think honesty is the only thing left that actually serves you, the conspiracy charge alone is close to indefensible. The cooperating witness’s statement is corroborated by financial records that are, frankly, airtight. A jury hears that recording, hears the dates lining up against the transfers, hears about a knife in a parking lot at six in the morning, and I don’t see a realistic path to acquittal on that count. Add the assault charge from the park, with witnesses, with your own son’s injury documented in a hospital report, there’s no version of a trial where the math works in your favour.”

“What’s the alternative?” I said.

“A plea,” he said. “The DA’s office is willing to negotiate, given that the strength of their case is already secured; they don’t need to spend the resources on a trial they’re certain to win. A plea gets you a defined sentence instead of the maximum exposure a jury conviction would carry. It’s not a good outcome, Logan. I won’t pretend it is. But it’s a less catastrophic one than the alternative.”

I sat with the numbers for three days before I told him to proceed.

I told myself this was practical. I let it be practical, because the alternative, sitting with what I had actually done, fully, without the cover of legal strategy to organize my thinking around, was still more than I could hold for longer than a few minutes at a time.

The plea hearing took eleven minutes. I stood, and I said the words my lawyer had prepared, and I pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit murder, attempted murder, aggravated assault, and reckless endangerment of a minor, and the judge read out a sentence that translated, with credit for cooperation on the financial side, to twenty-two years before any possibility of parole.

I did not look at the gallery. I understood, distantly, that there was no one there to look at; Sedona wasn’t present, hadn’t needed to be, the matter settled entirely without requiring her further participation. My mother sat in the back row, alone. I caught her eye once, briefly. Before the proceedings concluded, I saw something in her face that I recognized. I saw a kind of distant clarity, as grief for a version of me that no longer existed and might never have existed at all.

Twenty-two years. I would be sixty-six before I was eligible for release, assuming nothing further complicated the timeline.

I asked my lawyer about Nick on the way out of the courtroom, the question arriving before I’d fully decided to ask it.

“Can I write to him?” I said. “Someday. Not now, I understand it can’t be now. But eventually.”

He was quiet for a moment. He showed a calm disposition of a man choosing how much honesty the question actually deserved.

“That’s a long way off, Logan. And I want to be clear with you about something important. It’s not really my decision, or your decision, or even strictly a legal decision once Nick is old enough to have a say in it. The custody order is final. Sedona has full legal authority over what contact, if any, gets permitted while he’s a minor. Beyond that, once he’s an adult, once he can make his own choices, whether he writes back, whether he wants any relationship with you at all, that’s entirely his to decide. Not yours. Not even Sedona’s, at that point. His.”

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