I blinked. “I deleted all his messages as soon as they came in. Kept blocking the different numbers they were coming from.”
“Deleted doesn’t always mean gone.” His voice had shifted into lawyer mode, clinical and focused. “Carriers keep records. And if he was using different numbers, that’s a pattern of harassment we can document. I’ll have my tech guy dig into it.”
Something in his eyes was already calculating.
“A year ago, he came back. Started showing up here, at the blue house.” The blue house. My sanctuary for aged-out foster kids. The one pure thing I’d created from all my pain.
“Here?” Ryker’s head snapped toward me. “Did you report it? File anything with the police?”
I shook my head. “I didn’t want to drag the kids into it. Cops asking questions, scaring them …”
His jaw tightened, but he didn’t lecture me. “Any witnesses? Anyone who saw him here?”
“I’m not sure. I don’t think so?”
“We can interview neighbors. Anyone who can corroborate that he was stalking you, that he came here, uninvited.” He pulled out his phone and typed a quick note. “This establishes that he was the aggressor. That you had reason to fear him.”
Iwasafraid. Which was why what happened next happened.
I set down the roller and faced him, needing him to understand this part. This was safe. This was the heroic version of me.
Wasn’t it?
“These kids have been through enough without some stalker contaminating their safe space.” My hands clenched. “The week before he …died… he came here again. Said things. Graphic, disgusting things about what he wanted to do to me. About how I owed him.”
Ryker’s hands curled into fists at his sides.
I didn’t want to tell him the next part. If there was any way to sweep it under the rug like my other past sins, I would have. But Ryker was my lawyer, and this had to do with the case. It might come out, and I didn’t want him to hear it from anyone but me.
“I was so scared he’d do something to me in front of the kids to traumatize them and so angry at him that I couldn’t see straight. I screamed at him on the lawn, calling him a psychopath.” I closed my eyes, trying to pull the memory into focus. “I shoved him. Hard.”
The fights I’d been in flashed through my mind. I’d have to tell Ryker about those too, wouldn’t I? Becausethosemight come up in court. Would he understand?
Not now. Save it. He doesn’t need to know everything right this second.
But even as I told myself that, guilt twisted in my chest. Every omission felt like a lie. Every piece of myself I held back was another brick in the wall between us.
Ryker deserved better than my half-truths. But the wholetruth might destroy us before we even had a chance to begin. And I needed him to hear the worst part of this case.
“And then I told him if he ever came around the blue house again, I’d fucking kill him.”
The words hung in the air between us.
Ryker stared at me, and I couldn’t read his expression. Couldn’t tell if this was the moment he decided I wasn’t worth it. That the real me—the angry, violent, glad-when-people-died version of me—was too much.
“Did anyone hear you say that?”
His question hit me like a punch to my heart. It was ridiculous to feel hurt; Ryker was my lawyer. He needed to ask if anyone had overheard potential premeditation.
“No,” I said. “I don’t think so.”
I waited for him to say something. I mean, my God, I’d threatened to kill the victim!
Before he could come up with any kind of response though, his phone buzzed. I wanted him to ignore the call because this was the most vulnerable I’d felt in as long as I remembered, and I needed Ryker to stay, to assure me that nothing had changed between us.
“I need to …” He gestured vaguely at his pocket, already stepping backward. Away. Creating space where, seconds ago, there’d been none.
The warmth between us evaporated so fast, it left me cold.
