"Otherwise, you would have left him a long time ago."
"That obvious?"
"Ever since I've known you, you have been convinced that you weren't good enough. Not good enough for your dad to stay—although, I'd say he would have left anyway, when your mom got ill or even without her getting ill. Some people are like that. It was no reflection on you. But somehow, you got it into your tiny, tiny, stubborn brain that you didn't deserve any better, so you didn’t aim for better. Don't blame Rick for the fact that you had no self-esteem."
"Thank you, I guess."
"You're welcome. Tough love, sweetheart, but that's what we're all about, right?"
She pulled me back into the proper lab, where Nick had finished.
"Nothing," he said. "All the pills are fine. But there's another thing."
"Yes?"
"There's only one set of fingerprints on the container."
"Aunt Violet’s, I assume?" My heart sank.
"Highly likely—except, like I said, only one set. And if she had been using this every day, several times a day, as you can see from the labels, there should have been fingerprints everywhere. The same ones, but everywhere."
"This dispenser has been wiped clean?"
"And after that," he continued, "it was only opened once. The fatal capsule was inserted just before she took it. She died during the night, so it was her last pill of the day."
"That gives us a timeline, doesn’t it?"
"It does. If the police want to hear it. They didn’t send a team to collect evidence.”
"Of course they will listen to you," Ange said. "This is proof, isn’t it?"
"I'll write a report, I'll seal the bag with the container and I’ll lock it in my cupboard until the time comes when, hopefully, the detective or one of his colleagues will take care of it. I won’t hand it back to you so there can be no suspicion that you have doctored anything."
"How could Bex have done anything? What if there are other fingerprints? That’s evidence!” Ange insisted.
"We'll see."
He took Ange's arm. "Ready to go home?"
He winked at me. "You're coming too, right?"
I nodded.
I waited until I lounged in the most comfortable chair in Ange’s kitchen, with a glass of medicinal wine in front of me, before I texted Rick back.
"Busy right now. Talk soon."
Chapter twenty-six
Isaid goodbye to Ange and Nick after a couple of hours with good food, music, and a lot of laughter. Instead of talking about murder and suspicions, we reminisced about the good old times.
Back when Ange and I were teenagers, we’d had our wild days. Or what we thought was so daring—like sneaking out in the middle of the night, crawling through our bedroom windows, and heading into the woods around Jake’s cabin.
It had been a favorite hangout - until one night before Halloween, when we were convinced, we’d seen a werewolf.
We’d stayed within the city boundaries after that. Of course, it had only been a dog running loose. Anyway, it was a story that we’d told each other for years—over campfires and to creep each other out.
It was fun to see that, deep down, we were still young and silly. And that wrinkles and the first gray hairs didn’t mean a thing.
