“Yeah. Word got out that he was giving us inside information, so he’s out pending an investigation.”
“He’s been in the department for so long, though. It would be awful for him to be terminated at this point in his career.”
Cameron shrugs. “He didn’t sound too upset about it, and since he is already in trouble, he saw no problem with letting us know that there is a murder weapon with a print on it. Or pieces of a weapon, at least. Apparently, they found—” he starts but then loses his nerve.
“Found what?”
He sighs. “I don’t want to upset you even more. It’s already been such an awful day.”
“I swear, Cameron. The only thing that can make this day worse is you having information and keeping it from me. Now tell me before I completely lose my mind.”
He looks conflicted about whether he should stay where he is or move closer to me, as if he expects me to freak out, or maybe even faint the second he reveals what the weapon is.
“I can handle it,” I say, but sit down on the couch anyway, which gives him some relief.
“Cartwright said that he doesn’t know all the details, but he heard they found broken glass around the crime scene, and that the autopsy report stated that there was some embedded in Delaney’s head too. His working theory is that Delaney was attacked with a glass cup or other heavy glass object of some sort, and since she was already inebriated, she either temporarily lost consciousness, or couldn’t swim her way to the edge of the pool before drowning.”
I am incredibly grateful that I sat down to appease Cameron a second ago, as the implications of what he just said sink in. “A glass cup like the dozens that I dried with a towel and placed in the drying rack with my bare hands back at the house?” Thebulk of the dishes we washed were wine glasses, but there was a decent amount of plain old drinking glasses to clean too.
And I touched every single one of them.
He sits down across from me and rests one hand on my shoulder to keep me steady. “Yes, but there’s still a chance that it’s not your print they recovered. I promise you that it’s not over yet. I’ll figure something out . . .”
He keeps making grand declarations, but his words start to muffle so that I can no longer make them out. Even if, by some miracle, it’s not my print on the glass, they still likely have enough to arrest me tonight on suspicion alone, especially since Detective Harvey knows that I have a deep cut, from glass, on my dominant hand.
It hits me then that whoever did this must have planned the entire thing out with the intent to frame someone else for it, and surprise, surprise, I was the lucky one chosen for them to pin it on. And whoevertheyare, they weren’t just anyone. No. It was either Judith, Leah, or Val. The lack of a perimeter breach proves that whoever did it was already inside the house. One of them planned this, wore gloves, and used a glass that they knew would have my print on it so that they could get away with it. And now, I will never, ever meet my nephew, because I will be behind bars for a crime that I didn’t commit.
You’d think that the confirmation that my curse has just placed the cherry on top of its most twistedly evil plan yet would make me spiral into a full-blown meltdown, or at least produce a series of soul-racking sobs, but it does the opposite. An eerie calm comes over me, as if I am separated from my body, and watching this all unfold while hovering from above.
It really took an unfathomable level of trickery to pull this off, and for that, I can only shake my curses hand, like a professional chess player who has just been outsmarted after an hours-long and hard-fought match. My curse was never going to let me bein my nephew’s life, or have Cameron, and I’ve wasted so much time and energy worrying about both of them when they were never mine to keep.
“Are you still with me?” Cameron asks. He gently shakes my shoulder to pull me back to the present moment.
I look up to him with a new perspective, and ask in a voice that is not completely my own, “How do you know that I’m innocent, when all of the evidence points to the contrary?”
His initial reaction is to laugh, but when he sees that I am not joking, an edge of worry creeps into his brow. “Drew, come on. I know you—”
“No, you don’t,” I argue, even though he’s the only person I have left, and it’s probably a terrible idea to push him away like this.
He frowns deeply. “I do, though. And you know me too.”
“Really? Then what’s my middle name?”
He shakes his head, incredulously. “We know each other’s deepest regrets, Drew. And the secrets that we keep hidden from the world. I think that holds a lot more weight than knowing each other’s middle names.”
“It’s Emerson,” I say. “As in Ralph Waldo Emerson. My mom was—”
“A librarian. I know,” he interrupts. “You told me that when we first met, and I’ve been thinking about it ever since. My guess is that she must have named your brother Scott after Orson Scott Card, or F. Scott Fitzgerald, unless she was really into Teen Wolf from 1985 and named him after the character Scott Howard, which would be pretty cool too.”
I scowl when my own argument backfires and pull away when he reaches out for me again. “What can I do to comfort you right now?” he asks. “I have been trying to protect you while also giving you the space to act and feel however you need to, because this is an extremely stressful situation. But these last few hours,especially, have given me whiplash. One second you let me hold you, and then the next you recoil any time I try to get near you. I’ll follow your lead, but I need you to tell me exactly what you want from me, because I am really struggling here.”
“I don’t need anything from you.” I rise from the couch to head towards the door. “What I really need is to get out of here.”
Cameron follows me in a panic. “Can I come with you, at least? I’ll drive you wherever you want, or even give you the keys, but I don’t want to let you out of my sight in case—”
“In case what? The killer comes after me? Or something else bad happens?” I say, whipping around to challenge him. “In case you haven’t noticed, Cameron, this is all my life consists of: bad things happening to me and every single person around me. Look at my parents, and Delaney, and now Cartwright. All because of me, and it’s only a matter of time until something bad happens to you too.”
His shoulders rise and fall rapidly at my growing hysteria, but he seems at a loss for words, so I press forward.
