Chapter 55 The Long Wait
Three months into lockdown, cabin fever set in hard.
Lily stopped painting and started pacing. Claire’s stress-baking produced more bread than they could possibly eat. Aiden worked eighteen-hour days to avoid thinking about the walls closing in. And Ariella wrote obsessively, filling notebooks with everything she couldn’t say out loud.
The trial date kept getting pushed back. First to October. Then November. Then January.
“Winters’ lawyers are dragging it out deliberately,” Marcus explained during one of his weekly check-ins. “Every delay, every continuance, it’s strategy. The longer it takes, the more witnesses forget details. The more public attention fades. The weaker our case becomes.”
“So we just wait?” Ariella asked. “For months? Years?”
“Unless something changes. Unless we get new evidence compelling enough to expedite.”
But what new evidence could there be? They’d already released everything.
September arrived with rain and growing desperation.
Ariella woke up one morning to find Claire sitting in the kitchen, staring at nothing.
“Mom?”
“I had a dream about Ethan last night. He was alive. We were in the bakery. Everything was normal.” Claire’s voice was hollow. “Then I woke up and remembered he’s dead. That we’re trapped in this mansion. That the man who killed him is still free. And I thought what if this is all for nothing? What if we sacrificed everything and he still walks away?”
Ariella had no answer. She’d been thinking the same thing.
“We should do something normal,” she said instead. “Something that has nothing to do with Winters or trials or any of this.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know. Something that reminds us we’re still alive.”
They ended up having a movie marathon, all four of them crammed on the mansion’s enormous couch, watching terrible rom-coms and eating too much popcorn. For a few hours, they pretended they were just a family hanging out. Not prisoners waiting for justice.
That night, Aiden found Ariella in the library.
“You’ve been distant lately,” he said, sitting beside her.
“I’m literally locked in a house with you. I can’t be distant.”
“You know what I mean. You’re here but not here.”
She set down her notebook. “I’m tired. Of waiting. Of fighting. Of wondering if any of this matters.”
“It matters.”
“Does it? We’ve been in lockdown for three months. The trial keeps getting delayed. Winters is still out there living his life while we’re trapped in yours.” Her voice cracked. “What if this is it? What if we spend the next year waiting for a trial that never comes, and then we’re just…done? Used up? Too broken to remember what we were fighting for?”
Aiden took her hand. “Then we find something new to fight for.”
“Like what?”
“Like us. Like building a life beyond all this. Like…” He paused. “Like actually being married. For real. Not because of a contract or a crisis, but because we choose it.”
“We are married.”
“Legally, yeah. But Ariella, we got married to save a company and a bakery. We fell in love in the middle of chaos. We’ve never just been together. Without the drama. Without the performance.”
“And you think we can? After everything?”
“I think we have to try. Because if we let Winters take that too, our ability to just be happy then he really wins.”
She wanted to believe him. Wanted to believe they could build something normal from this mess.
“How do we do that? While we’re locked up? While we’re waiting for a trial that might not happen?”
“We start small. We have dinner together. We talk about things that aren’t evidence or threats or legal strategy. We remember who we are when we’re not at war.”
“I don’t know who I am when I’m not at war.”
“Then we figure it out together.”
It sounded impossible. But Ariella was tired of impossible things, so maybe one more wouldn’t hurt.
“Okay,” she said. “Let’s try.”
They started small.
Dinner every night, just the two of them. No phones. No talk of Winters or trials or anything related to the case, Just conversation. About books and music and what they wanted to do when this was over.
“I want to finish high school,” Ariella said one night. “Actually attend classes instead of online modules. Go to prom. Do normal teenage things.”
“You want to go to prom?”
“I want the option to go to prom. To decide it’s stupid and skip it. Instead of having the choice made for me by a billionaire’s revenge plot.”
“Fair point.” Aiden smiled. “I want to study architecture. Actually study it, not just sketch buildings in my spare time while running a company I never wanted.”
“You could do both.”
“Could I? Or is that just what people say when they don’t want to admit some dreams are incompatible?”
“I think you could do anything you decided to do. You’re stubborn enough.”
“Look who’s talking.”
They fell into a routine. Breakfast together. Aiden working while Ariella wrote. Lunch with Claire and Lily. Afternoons free, sometimes reading, sometimes just sitting in the same room doing nothing. Dinner alone. Evenings on the roof, watching the city they couldn’t access.
It wasn’t normal. But it was theirs.
October arrived with Lily’s fifteenth birthday.
They made it special despite the lockdown, Claire baked an elaborate cake, Ariella helped Lily set up a video call with her friends, Aiden gave her professional art supplies and a promise that when this was over, she could take any classes she wanted.
“Do you think it will be over?” Lily asked that night. “Or is this just our life now?”
“It’ll be over,” Aiden said with more certainty than he felt. “Eventually.”
“And then what?”
“Then we figure out who we are when we’re not surviving.”
“What if we’re boring? What if we’ve used up all our interest in this and we’re just normal?”
“Normal sounds perfect,” Ariella said.
Lily grinned. “You say that now. Wait until you’re bored out of your mind in some normal life with normal problems.”
“I’ll take normal problems over death threats any day.”
“Fair.”
In November, Marcus brought news that felt like a small victory: “Three more witnesses have come forward. People who worked for Winters years ago. They’re willing to testify about the culture of intimidation, the suspicious deaths, the pattern of behavior.”
“Will it expedite the trial?” Aiden asked.
“It might. The prosecutor is filing a motion to accelerate based on new evidence. We should know within a month.”
A month turned into six weeks. Then eight. Then December arrived with no decision.
“It’s like time doesn’t exist here,” Claire said one afternoon. “Just an endless present where nothing changes.”
She wasn’t wrong. The mansion had become unstuck from time, no seasons visible through bulletproof glass, no schedule beyond the one they created, no external markers of progress.
Ariella started marking days on her wall. Not counting down to anything specific, just proving they were moving forward even when it didn’t feel like it.