Two police cars pulled into the driveway behind her as he said it.
Silas had already filed the full report that morning. Fraud. Identity misuse. Unauthorized access to medical records, a federal offense on top of everything else.
Paige was arrested in Everett's driveway that night. Still in the middle of a sentence.
She didn't fight the officers. She just stood there, hands cuffed behind her, watching Everett through the open door. "You'll regret this," she said, quiet now instead of shouting. "I already regret a lot of things," Everett said. "This isn't one of them." The officers led her to the car without another word from either of them. Everett called Naomi the moment they drove away. "It's done," he said. "She's gone." Naomi didn't say much back. She just exhaled, long and slow, like she'd been holding that breath for a year.
The investigation that followed took nearly five months. Paige's lawyer tried to argue diminished culpability. He claimed she'd acted out of love, not malice. The prosecutor read the hospital redirect logs aloud in court instead. Three calls. Two days. A woman in labor, alone, believing her husband simply didn't care.
