Ryan sat in the living room watching the news three nights later with Zoe Isabelle, as he had decided to call her, in his arms dozing peacefully.
One of the women who had come to visit earlier that day had dressed her in the pink outfit she wore, complete with an enormous pink headband adorned with a fluffy bow. It looked slightly ridiculous, but he didn’t really care at this point. He had his daughter and she had him.
That was all that really mattered.
He pressed his lips against her little forehead tenderly as she slept, sighing happily.
She had been checked out thoroughly at a nearby hospital and Zoe was fine, despite the events that had taken place.
People had been stopping over left and right to see Zoe, and ask him how he was doing and that kind of thing. Their story was the leading one on every news station in the state right now, but he would be glad when he could just have his privacy back. Try to get things back to normal.
Ryan hadn’t slept in the bed he’d shared with Carrie at all since coming home, opting to sleep on the living room sofa instead.
Sometimes late at night, when he was restless, he would see his wife’s beautiful face in his mind. Her enchanting smile as she kissed him as they made love.
Sometimes he thought that it was all a bad dream, and that none of it had ever happened. But then he’d turn on the television, which he had tried to stop doing, or read a newspaper and it would all come flooding back.
He was taking it a day at a time, and he knew it would be a long time of healing before he got over all of this.
He had reached out to his parents, who were already on their way down from Hartford to help him pack up the house, which he had put on the market just that day. The same real estate company that handled the sale of Joan’s house would now handle his. He wanted nothing more to do with it, and he planned to use the money to start over up in Connecticut.
His parents had been very excited about meeting their granddaughter, but they were more excited about mending relations between the three of them and trying to be a family once again.
Ryan watched the television screen as a perfectly coiffed reporter talked about the Ashby Case and how he and Connie had exposed everything that had happened, along with Detectives Chandler and Harvey.
He had just spoken to the both of them on the phone earlier that day, promising to stop by the station with Zoe to say goodbye before he left New York for good.
Carrie had confessed to everything, hoping to get a lesser sentence by fully cooperating with the authorities.
She admitted that she and Joan had planned everything, even killed Doris when she threatened to tell Ryan about their nearly lifelong love affair.
Apparently, Doris had always known about them and used it as leverage to make life difficult for her daughter. She had been disgusted by her daughter’s love for another woman and made it clear that she ‘owned’ Joan.
In return, and unbeknownst to her mother, Joan had taken out the life-insurance policy on Doris. She had always intended to kill her, according to Carrie, but once they needed money to pull off the abduction Joan decided she wanted out from her mother’s thumb, with severance pay for a lifelong sentence of verbal and physical abuse.
They had finally linked Zachary Bronson to the murders of Morgan Pines, and an old couple living in Jackson Heights Queens, Gladys and Jerry Wright. Zach, afraid that they would talk to the cops, decided to take them out of the equation altogether.
Carrie revealed that she and Joan conspired to kill Zach because he was trying to extort more money from them and they figured that he would be blamed for Morgan’s murder as well.
Connie was still trying to work out a plea deal for a lesser sentence. Because of her help with capturing Joan and Carrie, and blowing the case wide open which led to arrests, it looked like she might get off with a lighter sentence than originally thought.
Of course she was fired from the hospital, and she would probably never be able to get a job in the security field again, but she had told Ryan it was only fair after what she’d done.
Ryan had been furious with her, but in the same token he could not have gotten Zoe back without Connie’s help. Ryan knew that he’d owe her for the rest of his life for this.
He laughed out loud as Zoe’s little rosebud mouth opened in a wide yawn and then closed as she continued to slumber.
They would be all right.