Finished, I sat back and stared into the middle distance as the slots of a puzzle I didn’t know I was building clicked into place. I wanted to unsee it. Unread it. I wanted to go back in time to Apple Cinnamon Cheerios and cartoons on the couch. It was a holiday, for fuck’s sake. Why was I at work?
My attention drifted to Jolie’s statement against Yates. The blood on his cheek. The anger in her eyes. The way he pulled her hair and brought her to her knees.
“You motherfucker.” I snatched the paper off the desk and balled it in my hands, bellowing, “You goddamn motherfucker.”
I wiped my search history, shut down the computer, and took all incriminating information with me. Then I raced from the office, determined to get ahead of this mess before someone else figured out the painful truth.
37
Dominique
I couldn’t sit still.After getting off the phone with Kobe, my focus was shot. Cosette wanted to play, but I was hopelessly disengaged, drifting into my own world countless times. The context of the phone call cycled on an endless loop. My brain ran in overdrive, thinking about Kobe and the situation, hearing everything he said and everything he didn’t.
What did “Yates acted inappropriately” mean? That it got physical? Physical with whom? Jolie? Kobe? Had Yates gone after the girl? Had he hurt her? What happened to feeling guilty? What happened to self-reproach? What happened to doing better and righting wrongs? His whole, I have a daughter and see the error of my ways. Was it bullshit?
I knew the words were meaningless. This was proof. Yates was out for himself. He had always been out for himself.
The four walls of the house pressed in on me. I had to do something. It would likely be impossible to steer Kobe off this path. Did I dare try? I had told myself that whatever he chose,I would live with it. It could bring us closer together or tear us apart.
I thought of three university boys taking advantage of a girl who was practically a child. Of a doctor who didn’t care and a police officer who called her a whore.
Fucking Yates.
For whatever reason, Kobe hadn’t connected the last dot. He didn’t see that Yates would be a victim too. Yates was part of it. His days were numbered.
If Kobe turned his back, Yates wouldn’t walk away alive.
And yet, I couldn’t find an ounce of humanity within me to care. Yates had made his bed. The world would be a better place without these awful men. In death, they couldn’t destroy anyone else’s life.
Kobe felt the same. I saw it in his clenched fists and tense jaw when he mentioned his theory. I heard it in the way he spoke so venomously about the law failing those university girls whose screams for help were ignored. I saw the disgust in his eyes when he looked at the bodies and considered what they’d done.
I should sit with Cosette. I should wrap her in my arms and kiss her soft hair and thank god she was with me. I could have lost them both. It had been Angelique’s choice, and she’d chosen to give the baby a chance at life. She’d entrusted her to me.
I should hold her in my arms and pray that she was never subjected to the wrath of cruel men like Jesse, Ford, Malik, Navid, and Ari fucking Yates.
But I didn’t.
I made a phone call.
It took forty minutes for a babysitter to arrive. I spent it in my office, staring at an innocent child with a dandelion gone to seed clutched in her hands, her bow lips puckered to blow, her eyes squinting with the effort.
What did you wish for, ma belle?
I opened the laptop and logged in.
Kobe hadn’t connected the pieces. He didn’t know Yates was a target. How long until he sorted it out? Warned him?
But I knew.
Jolie’s arrival would have propelled the narrative of Kobe’s case. He would be delving deeper into her story, unraveling all the elements he could find as he summoned the courage and strength to make a difficult decision. He would find out all he could about Jolie and her friend and the boy who accompanied them on that terrible night.
Kobe was smart and focused when he had to be.
But he would not be thinking about Yates.He took off, Kobe had said.
He was out there. Alone.
I hoped I could get to him on time.
