Chapter Thirty-Eight
“What are you talking about?” I braced for more lies, but then it registered that this was the first time Lizzie wasn’t fidgeting or on edge around me. Instead, she seemed resigned.
“It was an accident,” she said with quiet resolve. “Ali didn’t mean it. He was just trying to protect me.”
My scalp tingled. “Protect you from what?”
“My father.” She walked into the sitting room and over to the window. I followed her. “Daddy was overprotective, and he had a temper, especially when he drank. And he drank a lot. Too much. He caught Ali kissing me.”
“What happened?”
“Daddy walked in on Ali kissing me in our family room when I was seventeen. It was just a kiss. An innocent teenage thing.” Her blue eyes filled. “Ali and I were sitting on the fireplace hearth—you know, that built-in brick bench in front of the fire—”
“I know what a hearth is.” I remembered Nasser telling me about the police report and how Lawrence Martins had died at home after accidentally falling and hitting his head on the raised hearth. “Go on.”
“That’s why I’ve been avoiding you,” she said quietly. “Ali took his secret to the grave. I thought it wasn’t my place to tell you.”
Dread trickled through me. “Tell me what?”
“He protected me when I needed it.” She swiped a tear away. “I felt that the least I could do was protect Ali in death.”
“What happened?” My voice came out as a whisper. I cleared my throat. “I need to know. Tell me.”
“We jumped up as soon as my dad tore into the room, calling me a whore—” She bit her lip, trying to keep her composure. “He was coming at me. I think he was going to hit me. Ali instinctively stepped between us and shoved my father away. That’s when Daddy fell and hit his head.”
I recoiled as though she’d punched me. “No. You’re not saying—” I couldn’t bring myself to put words to the thought.
“It wasn’t like it was a hard push or anything,” she said. “But Ali was an eighteen-year-old high school athlete. Daddy was an out-of-shape man in his fifties. He stumbled backward and tripped over our shoes, which we’d taken off. He fell and hit his head.”
“On the fireplace.” My voice cracked.
“Sit down,” she said gently, coming over and guiding me into the nearest chair. “You don’t look very good. You’ve lost all the color in your face.”
I slumped into the chair, my legs giving out. “Keep going. I need to hear everything.”
Sitting opposite me, Lizzie told me the rest. Lawrence Martins was knocked unconscious by the fall. Her mother came into the room and told Lizzie to call 911. And then Mrs. Martins turned to Ali and told him to go home. Her husband would already be furious when he woke up, and seeing Ali would make things worse.It’s OK,she’d said to Ali.He’s had too much to drink. And the paramedics are on their way. They’ll check him out. Everything is fine.So Ali, a scared teenager in way over his head, had done what Mrs. Martins asked.
“But then the paramedics came,” Lizzie said. “And it was worse than we thought. My father had stopped breathing. They transported him to the hospital, but there was nothing to be done. It was too late.”
“No.” I shook my head, not wanting to believe what I was hearing. “No.”
When Ali heard the news the next day, he told Mrs. Martins that he was going to tell the police the truth.It was an accident,he said.I’ll explain it all to them.But Mrs. Martins had insisted that Ali stay silent.
“We’d already lied to police,” Lizzie said to me. “How would it look if we told them, after the fact, that Ali was there when my father fell, that he pushed him?”
My throat was dry. Poor Ali. “He wanted to tell the truth.” Of course he had. That was the man I knew.
“My mother begged Ali to say nothing. We would all look like liars, like we were guilty of something. There was also an insurance policy.” She hauled a decorative pillow into her lap, her fingers toying with the fringed trim. “We were going to need that money to live on after Daddy died. If there were any questions surrounding his death, we risked losing everything—the house, the ability to pay for college,everything. Mom told Ali that he’d do even more damage to my family if he went to the police. And we’d already been hurt enough with Daddy’s death.”
“All this time.” Nausea stirred in my stomach. “Ali lived hisentireadult life with this horrible secret?”
“It was the only way. He was eighteen. His life could have been ruined.”
My heart ached for what Ali had endured. To keep a secret like that, to be unable to seek public exoneration, had to have eaten away at him. “It was wrong of your mother to make him lie.”
“Was it?” she asked. “Mom reminded him that he was his parents’ only son. It would have killed them to have their son accused of murder. It could have ruined Ali’s future.”
“Or maybe you did it to save yourselves because the only real adult in the room, your mother, chose to lie to the police from the beginning.” Anger flared in my belly. “And then she forced a decent, naive kid to go against his principles so that she could get her insurance money.”
