Chapter 208: AFTER

DAMON'S POV

Catherine died on a Wednesday, eleven days after the wedding, in the quiet of a hospital morning, with Seraphina at her side and Diane in the corridor.

It wasn't the injury from the ceremony that took her. The injury had been managed, cleaned, stitched, monitored, the doctors cautiously optimistic through the first four days.

It was what had already been claiming her for a year.

The illness that had been lying under all the rest and that had apparently received the final installments of whatever remained of her by that particular moment she stood between her ex-husband and her grandson.

She knew this would happen. Seraphina said this to me in the car after leaving the hospital in a flat voice that implied she was still processing the death.

"She knew before the wedding," Seraphina said.

"The exertion, the injury...she knew what it was going to cost her and she drove through the night anyway. She chose it, Damon. She chose it deliberately."

"Mhm," I said.

"That means she decided the trade was worth it."

"Yes."

Seraphina was quiet for the rest of the drive. Not the locked, retreated quiet, the processing kind, the one I'd learned to sit beside without trying to reach into.

She took Marcus home and settled him into his bassinet at the kitchen table then she and I both sat at the table and sobbed the first deep sobs that had escaped me since the hospital room. Grief, the gut wrenching kind and I was there to sit and do what I can do and in those kinds of situations sometimes it is just sitting.

The weeks that followed felt more like an ending than a pausing. The initial filing crashed and burned.

Without her father behind it, his lawyers couldn't reasonably argue for the urgency of their clients while in pretrial custody for a charge of attempted abduction, though that didn't stop them from trying.

Crane's counter-filing got processed without argument, and her emergency motion to intervene was dismissed. There was no hearing on the underlying custody matter. The claims were judged meritless.

Her father was formally charged across six counts. Attempted kidnapping may not have been the most serious charge, but it was far from the least. According to evidence displayed there was a three year intelligence campaign and Joel Adeyemi had supplied assistance.

The device located underneath the kitchen table, Kessler's operation, and the testimony from Castellan.

His lawyers spent two weeks working on how to bury that from the judge, to no avail. He didn't look at Seraphina at the hearing.

She still went and sat in the gallery, watching, because she had made up her mind that the ending of this had to be witnessed. Lena's network documentation did what she'd said it would.

The second set of lawsuits-filed on the heels of structural defects she'd noted-involved another eight victims; five of those also settled before trial. Crane called that the most productive resolution possible, given the scale of what had been erected on her discovery.

She called it the most consequential case she'd been involved in. I told her it had been the most important year of my life.

There was a pause and then she said she was going to pretend I hadn't said something that human and move on, which was very Crane, and I was glad to have her.

Elena left on a Thursday morning.

She came downstairs with her bag, the same bag she'd been carried through the east doorway by five AM in this same empty space now blooming around its frame in another life entirely. She shook my hand, and kissed Seraphina goodbye, not altogether naturally, but completely and with her whole heart and then held Marcus.

He put his tiny hand on her face, like the way a baby puts their hand on someone’s face, and she held her face there and allowed that hand. There was some shutter of light that flickered across her expression, too fast for me to interpret.

So I looked away, since all moments were not, it is well known, meant to be looked upon by anyone but the one to which they pertained.

She left. The gate closed. The lane was quiet.

Diane left the following week. The monitoring equipment collected, the charts filed, the formal end of a role that had been more than a role for longer than its title suggested.

She stood at the door in her coat and said, with the clinical precision of a woman delivering a finding: "You did well. Both of you."

Then she left too, and the house was quieter for her absence in a way that was its own kind of testimony to what she'd been while she was in it.

Lyanna stayed a week longer than planned.

But she wouldn’t say that she was not ready to leave yet. She gave out all sort of excuses to wait a little longer. A delivery she just couldn’t let anyone take for her, an important call from good network connection, certain expressions Marcus had began trying that she had better examine closely before forming final decision to let Marcus know it had to stop as soon as possible.

All of it plausible, none of it true, and we said nothing about it because Lyanna would have left on principle if we'd named it and we wanted her to stay.

When she finally went she stood in the doorway with her bag and said: "He doesn't know what missing is yet. But he will. And when he does the first person he misses is going to be me. I'd just like that on record."

"Noted," I said.

"Good."

She hugged Seraphina for ages and then she hugged me which I was as always, taken by surprise when Lyanna decides to do rather than beat about the bush about the thing she had been aiming towards. And with out looking over her shoulder, she walked away because she was determined to go this time.

I watched her car until it was gone.

Then I went to find my wife and my son.