Chapter 7 - The Desperation of Garrett Bellamy
Garrett didn't wait for his partners to call him. He had spent the night on a sofa in his firm’s office on Broad Street, washing his face in the communal restroom sink and borrowing a spare dress shirt from one of his junior draftsmen.
He thought he still had time. He thought he could outmaneuver me, that he could play on my family's historic aversion to public scandal to force a quiet, closed-door settlement.
He didn't understand that when you burn down a woman's entire life, you also burn away the social constraints that once kept her polite.
At 2:30 PM, I was at my interior architectural design studio on Queen Street. The studio was my personal sanctuary—a sun-drenched space with fourteen-foot ceilings, exposed historic brick, and long drafting tables covered with fabric swatches, marble samples, and hand-drawn elevations. Lacey was with me, along with my senior assistant, Elena, who had already been instructed to lock the heavy iron gate at the entrance to the alleyway.
We were cataloging project files when the iron gate rattled violently.
“Reese!”
Garrett was standing outside the bars.
He looked entirely unraveled. The borrowed shirt was too tight across his broad shoulders, straining at the buttons. His jaw was dark with two days of stubble, his eyes bloodshot and sunken into dark, bruised hollows. In his hand, he clutched a thick stack of legal papers—Vivian’s emergency motion, which had been served on him at his firm’s office forty-five minutes earlier by two uniformed county deputies.
“Reese! Let me in!” he yelled through the bars.
Elena stepped back from the front window, her face pale. “Reese, should I call the police again?”
“No,” I said calmly. “Not yet.”
I walked toward the iron gate, stopping three feet short of the bars. The humid courtyard air was heavy with the scent of jasmine and impending rain.
“You have been served, Garrett,” I said through the iron scrollwork. “Under the terms of Judge Richardson’s order, you are prohibited from coming within five hundred feet of my residence or my place of business. You are currently in direct violation of a court order.”
“You froze the firm’s operating account!” he screamed, his voice breaking into a high, hysterical screech that turned the heads of two tourists walking down Queen Street. “My partners just had me escorted out of the building by private security! Frank and David called an emergency board meeting to vote on my expulsion! Do you have any idea what you’ve done? You’ve destroyed thirty years of my work in two hours!”
“No, Garrett,” I replied, looking directly into his bloodshot eyes. “You destroyed your work when you diverted municipal retention funds into a Delaware shell company. Frank and David didn't lock you out because of me. They locked you out because Marcus Diaz sent them the wire confirmations showing that you stole fourteen thousand dollars from the North Charleston project.”
Garrett’s face turned from crimson to a sickly, mottled ash. The papers in his hand fluttered as his fingers went slack.
“How… how did you—”
“Chloe Vance,” I said quietly.
The name hit him like a physical blow. He staggered backward half a step, his shoulder striking the damp brick wall of the alley.
“Chloe?” he whispered.
“She sent us everything, Garrett. Every text. Every email. The forged Beaufort County divorce decree you gave her. The receipts for the furniture you bought for her apartment using my Visa card. And the wire confirmation for her twenty thousand dollars.”
“She’s lying,” he gasped, his eyes darting frantically from side to side, looking for an escape that didn't exist. “She’s an opportunist! She targeted me, Reese! She knew I was vulnerable because of our marriage—she threw herself at me! She begged me to buy that condo!”
“Save it for the magistrate, Garrett,” I said.
He lunged toward the iron gate, wrapping his fingers around the bars, his face pressing against the metal with sudden, terrifying intensity. “Reese, please! You don’t know what you’re doing! Doug Miller says if this goes to the U.S. Attorney, it’s criminal wire fraud! I’m looking at five to ten years in federal prison! You can’t want that for me! We were married for nine years! I held your hand at your father’s funeral!”
A cold, sharp pain lanced through my chest at the mention of my father, but it didn't weaken me. It crystallized every remaining fragment of my resolve into diamond.
“My father knew what you were,” I whispered, stepping closer to the gate so that only he could hear me. “He told Vivian you were a five-dollar horse. And I was too blind to see it. But the blindfold is off now, Garrett. You used my father’s death to steal from his estate. You used my mother’s illness to sneak around with an assistant. You didn't hold my hand at his funeral because you loved me; you held it because you were measuring the size of the inheritance.”
“Reese—”
“If you don't turn around and walk away from this gate within thirty seconds,” I said, pointing down the alley toward Queen Street, “the two Charleston police officers sitting in the unmarked cruiser across the street are going to arrest you for aggravated stalking and violation of a protective order.”
Garrett snapped his head around.
Parked directly across the narrow entrance to the alley was a black Ford Explorer. The two officers inside were watching him through the windshield, their hands resting calmly on the dashboard.
Garrett looked back at me. For the first time in nine years, I saw him without the charm, without the smooth architectural jargon, without the easy, performative warmth that had conquered my twenty-six-year-old self.
I saw an empty, frightened, vicious little man whose house of cards had collapsed under the weight of his own hubris.
He didn't say another word.
May you like
He dropped the court papers onto the wet cobblestones, turned on his heel, and ran down the alley toward the street, his head ducked against the rain.
***
