Chapter 13: No More Practicing
The next contraction took my breath before I could answer Mara’s question.
She set the phone on the tray table and waited, one hand resting near mine without gripping it. The nurse adjusted the monitor, its paper strip curling at the edge. A steady heartbeat filled the room between the beeps.
When the pain eased, I nodded.
“I can do it.”
Mara tapped the screen. “They’re ready for you.”
A voice came through, thin with speakerphone static. “Mrs. Collins, can you hear us?”
“Yes.”
The lender’s conference room sounded cold and crowded: chairs shifting, a door closing, someone setting a glass on a table. I pictured Julian on one side, Melissa on the other, the paperwork between them like a bridge neither could cross alone.
Mara spoke first. “I’m providing the custodian’s confirmation, Nora Bell’s preserved records, and the lender portal history. The account holder disputes every claim of consent.”
No one interrupted her. She kept her voice level as she explained that Nora had released nothing, that the account custodian had recorded no pledge, and that the older inquiry had been initiated through Melissa’s Riverline credentials. The documents on the table proved what they proved. They did not make my father’s account Julian’s to offer.
Then came a brief silence.
Melissa’s voice entered the call. “I need to say this clearly. I opened that earlier inquiry.”
Julian shifted. I heard the scrape of a chair.
“I used my Riverline login,” Melissa continued. “I asked what the lender would require if Audrey’s account were considered as collateral. I relied on what Julian told me then. I shouldn’t have put her name into that process without speaking to her myself.”
Her words did not soften the fact of it. But this time, she had said it where it could be recorded.
Mara asked her to authenticate the complete message thread. Melissa confirmed the dates and sender information, and said the conversation matched what she had shown Mara.
“The thread is intact,” she said. “I sent the full export. You can compare it with my phone.”
Julian cut in. “Those messages don’t show the whole conversation.”
“They show what you wrote,” Melissa said.
“They show what I thought she would agree to.”
A sharp pressure gathered low in my back. I closed my eyes and breathed through it, listening as the room on the other end went quiet.
Mara spoke. “Mr. Collins, the question is whether Audrey consented to pledge her account.”
“She told me privately she wanted Riverline saved,” he said. “She said she’d help if it came to that.”
I opened my eyes.
The old version of me would have hurried to explain the kindness inside that claim: that I had wanted the project to survive, that I had wanted Julian to succeed, that marriage had once meant believing his emergencies were ours.
But wanting a man to succeed was not giving him my father’s money.
“I did not agree to pledge my account,” I said. “And I will not rescue Riverline with a signature you forged.”
There was a small, involuntary sound from the conference room. Maybe a breath. Maybe a hand against a table.
Julian’s voice sharpened. “You don’t know what you’re saying right now. You’re in labor.”
“I know exactly what I’m saying.”
The nurse glanced at the monitor and then at me, alert but calm. I pressed my palm against the bedrail until the tension passed.
“And don’t blame Leo,” I said. “He noticed adults practicing my name. He is six. He is not responsible for what you did with it.”
Julian answered quickly. “I never blamed him.”
“You tried to make the people listening believe I had put words in his mouth.”
Mara touched my wrist. Not to silence me. To remind me I was not alone in the room.
On the call, Julian started to speak, then stopped. Melissa said nothing. I imagined her looking at the message thread now, at the lines she had once treated as a plan and now had to carry as evidence.
The lender representative returned to the matter in front of them. His voice was deliberate, but no longer neutral in the way it had sounded before. He confirmed that the application still identified me as a willing participant, even after my written objection.
“That is not supported by the records we have reviewed,” he said.
Mara asked whether the application would proceed to funding.
“No,” the representative replied. “The collateral request is blocked. Riverline will not receive funds secured by Ms. Collins’s account.”
A breath left me, shaky and unfinished. Relief did not feel like triumph. It felt like setting down a heavy box and discovering my hands were still trembling.
The representative continued. “The application materials and related communications will be referred for investigation.”
Julian said my name, not loudly. For one second it sounded almost like the old way he said it when he wanted me to come stand beside him.
I didn’t answer.
The nurse came close and said the baby was moving down. Mara ended the call after the lender confirmed the decision. The conference-room sounds disappeared, leaving the hospital’s steady monitor and the rush of blood in my ears.
Through the closed connection, I had heard one last chair scrape. Then Julian’s voice, low and clipped, asking someone where he was supposed to go.
He had come for money that would not be his.
I had no time to wonder whether he understood what he had lost. Another contraction rose, deeper than the ones before it, and the room narrowed to the nurse’s steady instructions and Mara’s hand around mine.
“Breathe, Audrey,” the nurse said.
I did.
The pain broke over me, then receded. A nurse moved to my other side. Mara held the phone in one hand and my fingers in the other, though there was no one left to call.
I heard a small, wet cry.
For a beat, the sound seemed to belong to someone else’s room. Then the nurse lifted my daughter into view, red-faced and furious at the bright air, her fists tight beside her cheeks.
The lender’s meeting was over. The account was protected. Beyond that, nothing was settled—not the divorce, not Julian’s choices, not the shape of our family now.
But my daughter cried, and I heard her.
May you like
I touched her damp cheek with one trembling finger as Mara laughed through her tears.
The name on the papers would have to wait. This child was here, and she was hers.
