Detective Anand’s team moved to arrest Dr. Wexler that same morning, intercepting him before he could attempt any contact with the hospital or alert Desmond that the plan had already unraveled. Faced with the recorded evidence, Wexler’s composure collapsed within the first hour of questioning, and he agreed to cooperate fully in exchange for a reduced sentence recommendation, providing detailed testimony about the full scope of Desmond’s plan, including an earlier, more elaborate scheme involving a deliberately mishandled epidural that Wexler claimed he’d ultimately talked Desmond out of as “too obviously suspicious.”
With Wexler’s cooperation secured, Detective Anand’s team prepared to arrest Desmond, timing the operation carefully to avoid any disruption to my actual delivery, which Dr. Calloway determined, based on my labor’s progression, would likely begin within hours regardless of the unfolding investigation around me.
I gave birth to my daughter, Josephine, at 6:42 that evening, Dr. Calloway and her team managing a delivery that, freed from whatever danger Wexler’s original involvement might have posed, proceeded with entirely ordinary, unremarkable care. Bennett stood in for the support Desmond should have provided, having driven three hours the moment I’d called him that morning with the full story.
Desmond was arrested in the hospital waiting room less than an hour after Josephine’s birth, the timing coordinated by Detective Anand specifically to ensure my safety and the delivery’s completion before any confrontation began. He reportedly demanded to see me, to explain, to understand what had “gone wrong” with his plan—a request Detective Anand firmly denied, given the active criminal investigation.
I learned about his arrest secondhand, from Rosalind, while I was still holding Josephine for the first time, exhausted and overwhelmed by an entirely different, far more complicated set of emotions than most new mothers navigate on their first evening with a newborn.
PART 4
The criminal case against Desmond and Wexler moved forward over the following months, considerably strengthened by the recorded confession, Wexler’s cooperating testimony, and financial records that revealed Desmond had already begun quietly liquidating certain shared assets in anticipation of my death and his subsequent, uncontested inheritance of the twelve-million-dollar property company.
Fiona, once investigators contacted her regarding her own knowledge of the plan, claimed complete ignorance of the murder plot, insisting she’d believed Desmond and I were already separated and that his relationship with her was straightforward infidelity rather than something entangled with an active conspiracy to kill me. Investigators found no direct evidence implicating her in the plot itself, though her own pregnancy, and Desmond’s apparent plan to formalize their relationship once I was dead, remained a complicated, uncomfortable footnote to the broader case.
Desmond was ultimately charged with conspiracy to commit murder, solicitation of murder, and attempted fraud related to the anticipated inheritance. Facing overwhelming evidence between the recording and Wexler’s testimony, he accepted a plea deal resulting in a twenty-two-year sentence. Wexler, given his cooperation, received a reduced sentence of eight years on the conspiracy charge, along with permanent revocation of his medical license.
I filed for divorce the same week Desmond was formally charged, a process that, given the criminal proceedings and the clear evidence of his intent, moved through the courts with considerably less contention than a typical contested divorce. The prenuptial agreement I’d insisted on before our marriage, structured carefully by Rosalind’s predecessor at the firm years earlier, ensured my grandmother’s company remained entirely and unambiguously mine, protected from any claim Desmond might otherwise have attempted.
