But that night, alone in her hotel room, Dorothy understood something important:
Winning would not come from one hearing or one revelation.
It would come from endurance.
Colleen had prepared for war.
Now Dorothy had to finish it.
Part 4
The waiting was almost worse than the hearings.
At least inside a courtroom, time moved toward something. Outside it, Dorothy lived in suspended motion—bottle feedings, supervised visits, legal calls, hotel laundry, lists, receipts, and the constant ache of not yet knowing whether love and evidence would be enough.
Emmett warned her the next phase would involve strategy from Grant’s side.
“He knows the financial case is bad,” Emmett said. “So he’ll change the story.”
“He already has.”
“He’ll do it bigger.”
Dorothy understood what that meant two days later when Channel 7 aired an interview from Grant’s living room.
He wore an open-collar blue shirt and the carefully hollowed expression of a man inviting the public into his pain. The room behind him had been staged to look nurturing and tragic at once—neutral throw blankets, soft lighting, not a single visible photograph of Colleen.
“I loved my wife,” he told the reporter, eyes shining. “I believed we were building a family together. To lose her and then be attacked in this way by people who want to rewrite our life… it’s devastating.”
The reporter nodded sympathetically.
Grant continued. “I made mistakes in my marriage. I won’t deny that. But I loved those babies from the second I knew they existed.”
Dorothy switched off the television halfway through and sat very still.
The phrase lodged in her mind: those babies.
Not Margot. Not Bridget. Not Theodore.
Those babies.
He was already distancing himself from what he could no longer fully control.
By the next morning, the clip had gone online and spread fast.
At first the comments split cleanly into two camps. One group pitied Grant: poor widower, betrayed by donor deception, hounded by a controlling mother-in-law. The other group asked harder questions: if he loved his wife, why had his mistress moved in almost immediately? Why the forged insurance documents? Why the stolen inheritance? Why the second phone?
The internet, Dorothy learned, was ugly but efficient.
Grant had always thrived in contained environments—operating rooms, legal offices, dinner tables, church foyers. Places where reputation could be managed face-to-face.