Her eyes close, and I lose sight of some of the emotions. When she opens them, I’m no closer to knowing what she’s about to say.
She grips my wrists. “I need you, too, Chris. I’m scared, but I need you. But I don’t want my case to cause you stress, so please promise you’ll tell me if it gets to be too much.”
With a brief but heartfelt kiss to her perfect lips, I relent, “Okay, I’ll tell you. I don’t have any intention of stepping away completely from us, but if the legal side gets too difficult on me, we’ll have a conversation.”
Her face scrunches, and I think she’s going to backtrack and argue with me again, before her face clears and she relaxes a fraction of an inch. “Okay, I can work with that.”
I hope she means that, but I don’t push her for more reassurance. I just have to take her at her word and hope we’ll make it through this.
In every way.
She rests her head on my shoulder, and we stare into the woods. “Who do you think really did it?”
I close my eyes for a second, the bitterness burning in my chest. When I open them, I tell her, “Monica had a life insurance policy for a quarter of a million dollars that had her daughter as the beneficiary. I can’t prove it, but I think Christy found out and didn’t want to wait.”
Lily wraps her arm around my waist and hugs me tight. Having her silent support, as I admit something that I don’t say out loud very often, means more than I could ever express.
Lily’s curledup on the couch with a book, while I’m sprawled out on the other end of the couch, digging into every folder and document on Blake’s laptop. After the charged conversation about Tom earlier, we had a very quiet dinner, both of us lost in thought.
The conversation still leaves me with a knot in my stomach, only because thinking about what happened to Tom and Monica is still so emotionally draining for me. It’s difficult, even all these years later, to pull myself out of that dark place I was in after the trial.
But today, the knot is a little lighter, and it’s loosening more easily. Not because I’m not still impacted by what happened, but because having said the whole story out loud after so long of bottling it up feels cathartic.
Now I just need to focus on helping Lily.
I open a few documents and take some notes. Tapping my pen on the notepad, I read through everything I’ve written over the last thirty minutes.
Glancing over at Lily, I ask, “Does the last name Goodwin sound familiar?”
She looks up from her book and squints in thought. “Uh, I don’t think so? But if I’m being completely honest, on the rare occasions that Blake did talk about work with me, I didn’t pay much attention. And when we went to parties, I rarely retained anyone’s name.”
“Hmm, okay.” I look back at the laptop and tap my pen some more.
The couch shifts, and Lily’s body heat envelops my side. She rests her cheek on my shoulder so she can see the screen.
“Find anything useful?”
Letting out a disappointed sigh, I admit, “I don’t know. Maybe. Or maybe not. It seems like a lot of what’s in here is written in a shorthand of sorts. Or at least in a way only Blake understands. I’m looking for anything that connects it and makes sense.”
We both silently read the document I have up—me for the fifth time and Lily for the first.
“You know who might be able to help is Vernon.”
Grumbling, I tell her, “Already tried that. He wasn’t too enthusiastic about helping.”
“Really? When did you go talk to him?”
“Yesterday. Right before I realized I was being followed, actually.”
“And he said he wouldn’t help?” She sounds surprised.
“Well, at first, he didn’t seem like he wanted to, but he eventually agreed he’d look through his files and send me anything he thought would be helpful. So who knows if he will follow through or not.”
Lily frowns. “That makes me kind of sad.”
Now it’s my turn to be surprised. “Why’s that?”
She shrugs. “Vernon and I weren’t close by any means, but I always thought he liked me. I guess I thought that with Blake gone, his loyalty to him would be too.”
