Written with Regret (The Regret Duet #1)(23)

“They were ready,” Doug replied. “From what I’ve heard, her attorney was waiting for her at the station with a whole pile of paperwork. They spent an hour in questioning, rushed her through processing, and released her on a fifty-thousand-dollar bond.”

I raked a hand through the top of my hair. “You have got to be shitting me.”

“She has no record, Caven. They couldn’t charge her with theft of your property because, as we expected, none of the prints lifted at your old apartment matched. A date has been set before a judge on Monday for the child abandonment charges, but I’m warning you: Her attorney is good. I’m not sure the prosecution is going to be able to keep up.”

The blood thundering in my ears reached new decibels. “What the fuck does that mean?”

“It means, I don’t know that she’ll be convicted of anything. If I were her attorney, I’d argue that she didn’t abandon the child, but that she was unable to care for it and simply asked a friend to deliver her baby to the father. The endangerment that happened after that wasn’t her fault. Personally, I think the prosecution’s best bet would be a neglect charge. And I don’t doubt that they will see that too. But with it being her first offense and since a judge would probably agree that Hadley did what was best for Rosalee by leaving her with you, I can’t imagine she’d get slapped with anything more than a misdemeanor and some community service. Though, if that happens, we could definitely hit her hard with a child support case.”

I loved Doug. He’d been my attorney for a lot of years, and despite the fact that he was creeping up on seventy, I even considered him a friend. He’d been there for me every step of the way when we’d first found Rosalee, and he’d gone so far as to invite us over to his family’s house for Christmas dinner a few times. But never, not once, in all the years I’d known him had I considered ripping his head off his body like I did in that moment.

“Child support,” I hissed. “You want me to sue that woman for fucking child support.”

“Caven, listen.”

“No, you listen. I don’t need whatever measly check a judge orders her to write. What I need is for that woman to scurry back into the pits of Hell where she belongs. She told me today that she wants to be there for Rosalee. To be a part of her life. And please, Doug, tell me you hear me when I say that is not going to fucking happen.”

“I hear you, and that’s exactly what I’m trying to prevent. Look, my specialty isn’t family law, but if we get the neglect on her record, then she gets dinged on the child support because she can’t afford to pay four years all at once, the chance of her getting any kind of custody is—”

With a hurricane brewing inside me, I slammed my fist on the granite counter. “None! The chance of her getting any kind of custody is none. It’s not happening. Not today. Not four years from now. Not fucking forty years from now. I don’t give a damn what it costs. Hire the best family attorney the country has to offer and get a team going. This—”

“I can’t.”

“What the fuck do you mean you can’t?”

Doug rose to his feet, his stool scraping the hardwood. “Beth Watts is already working for Hadley.”

My head snapped back and I stared at him. The best was expensive. This was true in pretty much every facet of life, but especially when it came to lawyers. I didn’t know shit about Hadley; the one night I’d spent with her, we hadn’t done a lot of talking. But the fact that she’d robbed me on her way out of my apartment told me she wasn’t loaded.

“How is she affording this? Fifty-thousand-dollar bond and a bigwig attorney? That Prius we had towed did not scream cash.”

Doug sank down on the stool. “That I don’t know. Beth is known to take pro-bono work as long as it makes her look good. I can definitely see her taking on Hadley’s case knowing that she might get some press for going head-to-head with you.”

My stomach wrenched. The press. Fuck.

I was far from famous. Paparazzi didn’t stalk me in the streets or camp outside my house, but thanks to Kaleidoscope, my name was well known enough to hit the gossip news if anything juicy happened to me. Like, say, the mother of my child coming back and causing an uproar.

No one batted an eye when they found out I had a child. Reproduction by a one-time tech owner wasn’t interesting enough to warrant a ping on anyone’s radar. However, if the facts about Rosalee’s birth and how she’d been delivered to me were revealed in a messy court battle, it was going to ping on everyone’s radar.

“Son of a bitch,” I snarled, resuming my pace.

“What about a payoff?” Ian suggested. “Give her some cash and tell her to take a hike.”

“I’m not giving that bitch a fucking penny.”

He rose to his feet, his anxiety finally making an appearance. “Not even if it got her to leave? For fuck’s sake, Caven, this is not the goddamn time to hold a vendetta. We’re talking about Rosalee.”

I planted my hands on my hips. “I know what the fuck we’re talking about. She’s my daughter. But I’m not doing this every fucking four years. So what if I pay her off this time? Maybe we’ll get lucky and she won’t come back for another four years? I am not the Bank of Hadley. She does not get to use my daughter as collateral to blackmail me any time she’s short on cash. For all we know, that’s what she’s been planning from the start. Who the hell knows how many other men she has on the hook with this bullshit. But I’m not playing into it. I want this over. Once and for all.”