The Unfaithful Husband’s Scheme

Three days later, while Julian was still being held pending trial at the police station in Southwark, a heavily pregnant woman appeared at the front desk, clutching an American passport and a stack of documents proving a legally valid marriage.

It was Vilia.

After discovering Julian had fled with their shared money, she had reported it to American police, and traced his last known credit card transaction all the way to London.
For a woman this determined, half a world away was no obstacle at all.

The police allowed her a supervised visit with Julian.

According to what the duty officer that day later told Reginald, the Ashworth family’s solicitor, who had come to handle paperwork related to the case, the scene that unfolded in that visitation room left more than a few station staff turning away to hide their laughter.

Vilia walked in, staring hard at Julian slumped in his chair, silent for a long moment.
Then, without a word, she swung her hand and slapped him hard across the face, the sound ringing through the small room.

“Did you think you could run from a woman carrying your child?” she said, her voice cracking with fury, the words pouring out like a flood. “I nursed you back to health when no one else cared to. I married you knowing you had nothing to your name. I trusted you. And how do you repay me? By stealing from your own child and running halfway around the world!”

Julian cupped his cheek, unable to meet her eyes, mumbling a few feeble excuses.
“I… I was only going to sort out family business and come straight back, I never meant to leave you…”
“Don’t lie to me anymore,” Vilia cut in, her voice shaking with restrained tears and fury both. “I called your old health insurer in London. I know everything now, about your ex-wife, about the daughter you abandoned just like you tried to abandon me. What kind of man are you, Julian?”

Julian dropped his head, with no words left to answer, his shoulders sagging like a puppet with its strings cut.

She was quiet for a moment, resting a hand on her belly, taking a deep breath to steady herself before speaking again, her voice now a mixture of exhaustion and resolve.

“I’m not going to divorce you,” Vilia went on, her voice still trembling with anger but somewhat calmer now, “not because I still love a man who betrayed me the way you have, but because my child deserves a father who takes responsibility, even if only on paper. You’re coming back to the States with me, you’re going to work off every penny you took, and you’re going to live under my watch until I decide you’ve earned back my trust. If not, I will make certain you never see your child’s face.”

Legally speaking, since Julian had no valid residency documentation in the UK, his registration having been struck from the household record at the family’s request four years earlier, and with the threatening behaviour charge still under review, immigration authorities decided against further criminal prosecution and instead moved to deport Julian from the UK, on the condition that a sponsor take him out of the country immediately.

Vilia signed the sponsorship papers without a moment’s hesitation.

On the day Julian was escorted to Heathrow Airport, he looked back at London fading through the taxi window, the city that had once been his home, where a family he might have kept, had he only valued it, once lived.

Vilia sat beside him through the long flight back to Miami, saying nothing, gazing out the window with one hand resting on her pregnant belly.
Julian tried a few times to break the suffocating silence, but each time he met her cold gaze, he swallowed his words back down.

He returned to America a thoroughly beaten man, living out the rest of his life under the strict control of the wife he had once seen as nothing more than a temporary escape hatch.