Chapter 6 - LYDIA’S STORY
I met Lydia that evening in a secure medical suite two counties away.
She was thinner than I expected. Paler. Her hair had been cut badly at some point and grown back in uneven waves. But her eyes were clear.
That struck me first.
Not broken.
Not lost.
Clear.
When she saw me, she started to cry.
“I knew he’d do it again,” she whispered.
I sat beside her bed and took her hand.
“I’m sorry I didn’t find you sooner.”
“No,” she said. “You found me at all.”
The police interviewed her slowly, carefully, but she wanted me there.
And what she told us turned the Hawthorne scandal from attempted murder into something far darker.
Lydia had discovered, years ago, that Adrian’s marriage proposals were not romantic impulses.
They were strategic selections.
He pursued women with independent assets, family trusts, or future inheritances. Margaret did the screening. Charles handled the shell companies. Once the woman was married, she was isolated, studied, and pressured.
If she resisted, they used illness, humiliation, forged psychiatric narratives, or “accidents.”
Nora had resisted first.
Nora died.
Lydia resisted next.
Lydia disappeared.
And I had been chosen because I was not only financially valuable—I was also medically vulnerable. Margaret had learned early about my severe shellfish allergy and treated it like an option waiting on a shelf.
“But there’s one more thing,” Lydia said.
Her fingers trembled slightly.
“I found a ledger before they took me away. It listed payments under women’s initials. Not just ours.”
Officer Grant leaned in. “How many?”
Lydia closed her eyes.
“Seven.”
The room went still.
Seven wives, fiancées, or near-fiancées.
Seven women tied to policies, properties, or transfers.
Some alive.
Some missing.
Some dead in ways no one had reexamined because wealthy families know how to keep respectable faces while terrible things rot underneath them.
Then Lydia looked at me and added the final blow.
“The bracelet Celeste was wearing? It was Nora’s.”
I remembered it instantly—the diamonds catching chandelier light while I fought for air on the floor.
Adrian had moved from woman to woman like a collector.
Not of love.
Of trophies.
But Lydia had one last secret.
Before she was drugged and taken away, she copied Charles’s old offshore account numbers into the hem of a winter coat. The coat had stayed in the hidden room beneath the shed for six years.
Police rushed to retrieve it.
Inside the lining they found handwritten numbers and a name none of us expected:
Judge Eleanor Voss.
The same judge who had signed Lydia’s guardianship order.
The same judge scheduled to hear my emergency divorce petition if I had lived long enough to sign it.
The Hawthornes had not only trapped women.
They had help inside the system.
And at that exact moment, Officer Grant received another message.
Adrian was talking.
But only under one condition.
May you like
He wanted to speak to me alone.
Cliffhanger: Adrian had finally broken—but what he wanted to tell me was not about Lydia, Nora, or the money. It was about someone in my own life who had been feeding the Hawthornes information from the beginning.
