Double Trouble: Epilogue
 by Cariad
 
 
 

All good stories must come to an end
 
 

Double Trouble
~Epilogue~

Three days after Noah went back to school, the first letter addressed to Holly from Jonathan Hotchkiss arrived in the mail. With a patronizing smile, Julian gleefully handed the love letter to his eldest daughter. It was all Julia could do to keep her sister from tearing up the letter once out of their father’s view. It was at that point that Julia realized that they had never brought Holly in on the conspiracy. With a quick explanation, Holly handed over the letter, which was indeed from Noah to Julia. After that point, Holly lovingly addressed letters to Jonathan Hotchkiss, knowing they were in truth from her sister for Noah.

The only true letter that Holly sent Jonathan was a brusque note informing him that Adele had performed a nearly miraculous recovery. By the end of March, Adele was no longer bed-ridden, and was moving with a walker. Jonathan sent Holly a reply with only two words written on it: “Thank You.” Holly stared at the scrawled letters for a very long moment until her eyes blurred with wetness. Crumpling the letter in frustration, she threw it in the trash, only to retrieve it later that evening, flatten it the best she could, and put it in a locked box which contained only two other things: Jonathan’s Christmas present, and her engagement ring.

Ivy moved back into her apartment and filed for divorce in a gesture to make up to her lover, but Sam Bennett did not believe it. He sat her down and explained to her that he knew no matter how many divorces she got from Julian and no matter how much he wanted it differently, he would always come in second place to the money and wealth that the Cranes had to offer. He knew that whenever there was a crisis, he would be torn because Ivy would always go back to the Cranes and he would have to sit on the sidelines or even be on opposite sides. And he wanted to be there if Grace wanted to reconcile.

Ivy fumed while Sam told her off, but she did earn a promise out of him: No matter how angry he ever got with her, he would never again take it out on their children. She then told him triumphantly how Julia and Noah had successfully seen each other in the Hospital during Sam’s ban on relations between the Bennetts and the Cranes.

The divorce itself stretched on into months as Ethan and Harper, the Crane lawyer, argued about what exactly Ivy was entitled to as Julian’s ex-wife. All the while, Julia and Holly guided Theresa through being a society wife. At the running of the Kentucky Derby, May 4th, with Theresa over eight months pregnant, she held an afternoon tea in honor of the race and served mint juleps (Theresa abstained). Gwen even helped organize the event, and brought with her a close friend—though more than a few society matrons whispered there was more than friendship between lowly Hank Bennett and the peer Gwenevere Hotchkiss.

Theresa had never come completely clean regarding her involvement in the murders, but she insisted repeatedly in a story that never wavered that she had known nothing about what Aidan was up to. On the twenty-second of May, Theresa delivered a healthy baby boy via caesarian section—her pelvis was still too narrow. The divorce still had not been finalized. Theresa woke up long enough to name the baby Martin Fitzgerald Crane. She suckled the baby once, and then fell back asleep for two weeks until she died.

Heartbroken, Ethan went into a deep mourning and his practice nearly went bankrupt. At that point, Ivy figured the divorce would just go on forever, and it would be her curse to stay married to Julian—so she gave in. Choosing money over Sam once more, she moved into the Crane Mansion and lavished attention on baby Martin, imagining he was truly Ethan’s son and therefore Sam’s grandson. Luis, of course, brought a custody suit against the Cranes, but like most judges in the state of Maine, the Cranes owned the court, and the ruling was for primary custody to remain with the father. Pilar did not mind, as Ivy, in a gesture of conciliation, appointed her long-suffering confidant to be Martin’s nurse.

The headlines read “Cranes Take New York by Storm!” when the twins moved into their dorm at Columbia. Jonathan Hotchkiss, as had been his habit since Ethan and Gwen had gotten closer to their engagement years previous, cut out the article and placed it in a scrap book. He traced his finger around Holly’s smiling face, closed his eyes, and sighed.

“I know,” replied his roommate since he had moved in the first day his freshman year at Harvard. “I know,” Noah Bennett said again.