“I’d like that, thanks,” she said. “You did a good job today.”
“So did you,” he said. “Organizing a photo shoot at the last minute couldn’t have been easy.” He paused. “Dealing with me probably wasn’t easy either.”
She smiled. “You billionaires really are a handful.”
“I’m just glad it’s over,” he said.
“Don’t forget, you still have to do a podcast this week,” she reminded him.
He groaned and started to tear open the package. “Don’t remind me.”
Her phone started ringing before she could respond, and she answered it quickly. “Oh, hello, Aaron. No, it’s no trouble. I’m free at the moment.”
While she talked with her lawyer, Simon turned on the oven.
“What?” Heather’s panicked voice dragged his attention from the oven. “Are you sure?” She paused, her face turning pale. Apprehension flashed in her eyes as she turned her attention to him. “Is it okay if Aaron comes over? Something has come up.”
“Of course he can come over.” Simon frowned, not liking the tremble in her voice one bit. Something was clearly wrong.
“Yes, Aaron, you can come over. Okay, see you in twenty minutes.” She hung up and stared at him, her face growing even paler.
“Heather, what is it?” he asked.
“Aaron wants to talk about what he’s managed to get on Gary,” she said.
“That’s good news, isn’t it?”
She bit her lip. “That’s just it. I don’t think they’ve found enough to help with my case, and the next hearing is in three days.”
His chest tightened. That was bad. Simon had been certain the law firm’s investigators would have found dirt on Gary. He had been certain that Gary was shady. But if there wasn’t enough evidence against him, she could lose the court case. Lose Finn for good.
He looked at her, and already he could see a crack in the brave veneer she had put up for the past several days. She was shaking, her eyes glassy.
“You need to eat something,” he said firmly. “I’ll get this pizza into the oven and then we can wait for Aaron to arrive, so that we can get the full story.”
Chapter 17
“What do you mean you haven’t found anything?” she asked desperately.
“I mean we haven’t found enough,” her lawyer replied in an apologetic tone.
She was sitting next to Simon in the living room, holding his hand tightly as she processed what Aaron was telling her. “What did your investigator find?”
“We discovered that Gary has been unemployed for quite some time,” Aaron explained. “He hasn’t had a steady job in months.”
“But isn’t that good news for us?” she pressed. “We can tell the judge that Gary doesn’t have a stable job, and therefore can’t have sole custody of Finn.”
“The problem with that strategy is, you were unemployed until relatively recently,” Aaron replied. “Using this information could backfire on us. It might actually make things worse for our case against Gary.”
Panic gripped her heart so tightly she could barely breathe. Images of Finn being dragged away from her flashed in her mind. “Why he was fired? Couldn’t we use something like that against him?”
“We haven’t been able to establish the exact reason why he was fired, but right now it looks like a layoff,” Aaron said.
A layoff was exactly the scenario she had dealt with months before she started working at Dover. If she went after Gary for getting laid off the same way she had, she’d look like a hypocrite. “So, you’re saying we’ve got dirt, it’s just not the right kind.”
“It would have been useful under different circumstances, but given your own work history it would be dangerous to use this new information,” Aaron said. “I’m sorry, Heather.”
Hot, blinding tears started to roll down her cheeks. She opened her mouth to speak, but her words were drowned out by choking sobs. Simon wrapped his arms around her and pulled her close. As the reality of the situation really began to hit home, not even Simon could soothe her ache. Soothe the pain of losing her son.