Jenay nodded. “I’m not surprised,” she said. “They should have never got involved.”
“So you’re okay with Paige’s light sentence?” Charles asked.
“I’m not okay with it, no. But I’m not surprised by it. That’s what I’m saying.”
“Anyway, I’ve got to run,” Brent said.
“Want to stay for lunch, Brent?” Jenay asked him.
“Thanks, but I can’t. I’m taking Kerstin to lunch.”
“I thought you guys broke up,” Charles said. “At least that’s what Anthony told me.”
“Tony talks too much,” Brent said. “And I’m almost late. See you guys later,” he said, and left.
Jenay looked at Charles. Charles continued dressing. “What was that about? The fact that Paige won’t do any time?”
“And that Donald will do a year.”
Jenay hesitated. She studied Charles. “A year in prison?”
“Yes.”
“How do you feel about that?”
“I don’t feel great about it. But it’s needful. He could have killed that girl, Jenay.”
Jenay nodded. “I know. It’s an awful thing all around.”
Charles’s cell phone began to ring. “If I get him out of this jam,” he said, walking toward the nightstand, “then he’ll either end up in an early grave, or put somebody else in one. I can’t take that chance,” he added.
He grabbed his cell phone off the nightstand, and answered it. “This is Sinatra,” he said.
“She’s doing it, sir.”
Charles frowned. “Who is this?”
“It’s Reeva. She’s doing it. Abigail is doing it, sir.”
“Doing what?”
Reeva’s voice lowered. “Going to that place.”
Charles still didn’t get it. “What place?”
“That place in Lenmark, on Amsterdam Road. She’s going to do it, sir.”
Charles’s heart fell through his shoe. Even Jenay saw the change in his countenance. She walked over to him.
Charles was stunned. “But she can’t, can she? Isn’t it too late?” he asked Reeva.
“No, sir,” Reeva responded. “They’ll do it up to fourteen weeks. Sometimes even later than that.”
“Where is she now?” he asked Reeva. “Has she left?
“Yes, sir.”
“And you didn’t stop her?”
“I didn’t know she was going! The maid just told me she had gone.”
Charles ended the call, grabbed his keys and wallet off the nightstand, and hurried for the exit. “Let’s go,” he said to Jenay.
“Go where?” Jenay responded.
“Let’s go,” he said again, although he was already out of the room.
“Go where?” Jenay asked again, although she was already hurrying behind him.
He stopped his car illegally at the curb, jumped out, and ran into the clinic. Jenay jumped out behind him and ran in too, although she wasn’t quite sure what he thought he was going to do. It wasn’t as if he could stop her. It wasn’t as if it was his body. But she couldn’t reason with Charles right now.
“Abigail Ridge,” Charles said to the nurse behind the desk as soon as he walked into the waiting room. “Where is she?”
“I’m afraid, sir--”
“Where is she?” Charles asked again, his heart pounding. And then he began hurrying for the backrooms, to find her himself.
“Sir, you can’t go back there!” the nurse insisted. “Sir!”
But Jenay could have took her she was wasting her breath. Charles had already gone back there. The nurse hurried behind him, and so did Jenay. He was opening and closing the doors to exam rooms, until he opened the right door to the right exam room.
And there was Abby. Lying on the hospital bed. Charles stopped in his tracks.
“It’s done, sir,” the nurse said behind him. “It’s done.”
Charles stared at the woman he never loved, but at least used to respect. “How could you?” he asked her.
Abby looked from Charles to Jenay. Then back at Charles. “How could you?” she asked. And then she smiled. “Payback is a bitch. Isn’t it?”
Jenay held onto Charles’s arm. Her man wasn’t about to go to anybody’s jail today because of that woman on that bed right there.
But Jenay was worrying needlessly. Charles wasn’t enraged with Abby. He was in pain for his child. A child he would never know.
He stared at Abby, and then he looked at Jenay.
“Let’s go,” he said, and then they left.
But that next day, when Abby Ridge left the clinic in Lenmark, Maine, and made it back to her home Jericho, she encountered a shocking scene: everything she owned was outside, and an attorney, Charles’s attorney, was waiting for her.