Chapter 20: The Free Woman

Rory's POV

The doctor at the Miami hospital was a real one, a tired woman with two pens in her hair.

She read my blood panel aloud twice.

"Whatever was in you has cleared," she said. "Your liver is bruised. Your heart is sound."

She looked up at me.

"You have nothing terminal, Mr. Keane, and I don't think you ever did."

I had known it for nine days.

It was different to hear it said with a chart in her hand.

I sat on the edge of the hospital bed and looked through the glass door.

My wife was asleep in the corridor chair with her head against the wall.

Someone had given her a bag of ice for her cheek, and it had slid into her lap.

She had a bruise the size of my palm.

She had gone onto a stage in front of four hundred people with it.

"Mr. Keane?"

"Sorry. Yes."

"I said, you can go home today."

I did not tell her I wasn't sure which home that was.

The lawyer came at ten.

He brought a folder, and he sat in the hospital room's one chair with his knees together.

"Desmond has been charged," he said. "Attempted murder, false imprisonment, fraud."

"And the doctor?"

"In custody in Tampa. The Keane board met by phone at eight and removed Desmond from every office."

"And the shares?"

"Yours. As they always were." He cleared his throat. "There is also the matter of the marriage."

Willa had woken at the sound of the door.

She stood in the doorway with her hair coming down and the ice bag in her hand.

"What about it?" she said.

"The widow clause is void. A court would never enforce it, and the whole prenup can be set aside."

Keep reading free with an account. Start The Widow's Fate They Chose Was My Escape Plan from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.