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25
“Wait, are you serious?!”
My jaw drops, my eyes bulging as I latch onto what Maggie’s just said over the phone.
“Full dismissal. They’re dropping the case entirely.”
I shriek, loudly. At his desk across the room by the open windows, Noel’s head yanks up from the laptop it’s been buried in. He arches a brow, a smile teasing his lips as I start to jump up and down, still shrieking.
“Maggie!”I crow into the phone.
My lawyer laughs.
“I knew they were grasping! I mean, they had circumstantial stuff, at best. But there weren’t any real legs to that case. Which…” she sighs. “Sort of makes me wonder why the hell they went forward with it in the first place. But, hey, you’re done with it.”
“Thank you!” I blurt gleefully.
“Oh, I’d love to take credit, but this was all the Crown. The lead solicitor just reached out to me right before I called you to tell me they were completely abandoning all charges and proceedings.”
I grin so wide my face hurts across the room to Noel.
“Now, in terms of damage done by the media leak?” She sighs heavily. “They’ll stonewall on that. I mean, I’d love to go after it, even pro-bono. But that’s a lost cause, I’m afraid. The Crown won’t in a million years admit to an internal media leak, which means they’ll never give a public statement recanting anything. And you won’t find a judge in the country that’ll allow a citizen to press for damages on something like that. It’s a closed system, I’m sorry to say.”
I shake my head.
“It’s fine. It’s not like I was a pillar of society before this.”
“Well, they pulled a dirty move with that. And it pisses me off that we can’t press them for it.”
She sighs again.
“Anyway. Congratulations, Ella. We literally couldn’t have asked for a better outcome.”
“Nope,” I laugh. “And thank you so much for everything!”
When I hang up, Noel is still looking at me curiously. My face splits into a huge grin again.
“They dropped the case!” I scream again, jumping up and down and laughing. The weight seems to just slide off my shoulders, and the breath I inhale feels like the first full one I’ve had since this whole thing went sideways.
But when I look up at Noel again, he’s still just sitting there, smirking, looking amused.
“I mean, don’t get too excited or any—”
I stop short, frowning.
“You knew.”
When his lips curl a little more, and his brow arches slightly, my mouth falls open.
“How thehelldid you know? And how did you possibly know before my own freaking lawyer?”
Noel just sighs, shrugging.
“I know people, I suppose.”
I roll my eyes, slinking towards him until I’m right in front of his chair. I lean down to kiss him softly.
“The one crap thing is that Maggie says there’s nothing we can do in terms of having them issue a statement to clear up the media leak. But” I shrug. “it is what it—”
