All Chapters of My Husband Sold Me to His Blind Billionaire Uncle: Chapter 81 - Chapter 90

Thomas's response to the phone call was exactly what I had expected from Thomas, which was that he listened to the full account without interrupting, asked two clarifying questions, and then was quiet for long enough that Sebastian had to say "Thomas" once to confirm he was still there, and Thomas said he was still there, he was thinking, and what he was thinking was that this information changed the closing argument in one specific way that he needed the night to work out and he would call in the morning with the revised approach.I heard all of this from the kitchen doorway because Sebastian had taken the call at the table and I had stayed rather than giving him privacy, partly because he hadn't asked for privacy and partly because I had decided, sometime in the past few weeks, that privacy in this house was something you asked for rather than something I assumed was needed, and he hadn't asked.When he ended the call he set the phone down and looked at the table for a moment and th

I told him in the morning.Not the full reckoning again — that had been said the night before, the asymmetry and the trajectory and the choice, all of it given and received in the study while the fire was still going. What I told him in the morning was the specific thing I hadn't said yet, the one that had been sitting underneath the reckoning the whole time I was doing it, the thing that the reckoning had been circling without quite arriving at because arriving at it required the reckoning to be finished first.We were at the kitchen table. Reed had made coffee and had gone to get his coat because he was coming to the closing arguments and was treating this with the same deliberate preparation he brought to everything that mattered, which meant he had been up early and had the house in order and was now doing the thing where he made himself temporarily absent to give people the space to say what they needed to say before the day began. I had come to appreciate this quality of Reed's

Thomas called on Tuesday morning to say the jury had questions.Not unusual, he said, for a case of this complexity — juries asked for clarification on documentary evidence, requested re-readings of specific testimony, sent notes through the bailiff that said things like "can we see exhibit forty-three again" and "what was the date on the Ashmore Holdings incorporation" and other questions that were either genuinely clarifying or were the jury's way of signaling which direction they were leaning without actually signaling it. Thomas said the questions being asked suggested they were working through the financial chain carefully, which was good, which meant they were taking the documentary evidence seriously rather than deciding on the basis of the narrative alone.I asked him what questions they were asking and he told me and I sat with them for a while after the call ended, trying to read the shape of the deliberation from the shape of the questions, which was the editorial instinct

Reed asked to speak to Sebastian on Tuesday morning.Not to both of us — to Sebastian specifically, which was significant because Reed, in the months I had been in this house, had developed a specific practice of addressing things to both of us simultaneously when the thing concerned the household and to me alone when the thing was something he had decided I needed to know before Sebastian did, which left a very small category of things he would ask to tell Sebastian alone, and that category was the category of things that had been between them for a long time and that I had not been part of and that Reed needed to give back to the person they had originally concerned.I understood this without being told and I went to the library and worked on the eastern expansion materials and let the study be the study for however long it needed to be, which turned out to be an hour and forty minutes, and when Sebastian came to the library afterward he sat in the chair across from mine with the qu

The sentencing was on a Thursday in February, which was six weeks after the verdict and which Thomas had described as relatively swift for a case of this complexity, and what Wren received was seven years on the financial fraud charge, four years concurrent on the conspiracy charge, and three years concurrent on the evidence suppression charge, with the possibility of reduction for cooperation with the Calloway proceeding which was now scheduled and which Thomas said would probably add to the total once it concluded but that was a matter for a different day and a different court. We heard about the sentencing by phone because Sebastian and I were in the third eastern market when it happened, which was not where we had planned to be when the sentencing occurred but which was where the informal layer had taken us, specifically to a meeting with a regulatory official who could only see us on that Thursday and whose willingness to see us at all was the result of a connection that had sta