“Uh, I need a moment with my lawyer,” Franklin said. “Could you give us some privacy?”
“Interview paused,” Grace replied for the sake of the recording.
She switched off the recorder, and Ethan walked out behind Livvy and Grace. The moment the door was shut, he stepped in front of Livvy.
“What happened in there? What’s wrong?” Ethan demanded. “Is it the baby?”
Grace looked at Livvy, too, and she muttered some profanity under her breath. “Are you all right?” she blurted, obviously seeing how little color there was in Livvy’s face.
“It’s not the baby,” Livvy assured them, and she swallowed hard. “When Franklin was talking, something flashed in my mind. Nothing having to do with the investigation or the nightmare,” she added. “I think it was an actual memory.”
That got Ethan’s attention. Grace’s, too. “Of what?” Grace asked.
“From when I was a child.” Livvy’s voice was trembling now, and Ethan slid his arm around her. “I was at New Hope. I was on those stairs where we saw Franklin and Sienna.”
Ethan had heard her go over every single detail of the nightmare and her childhood, but he’d never once heard hermention anything about being at New Hope. Or recognizing those stairs.
“I wasn’t alone,” Livvy continued after pulling in a long breath. “There was someone with me.” She lifted her head, her gaze locking with Ethan’s. “The woman from the sketch. The dead woman who I saw in the bathtub.” Her voice broke. “God, Ethan. I think I stabbed her.”
Chapter Thirteen
Livvy felt the dread and guilt slam through her. So much of it that it might have brought her to her knees.
Ethan made sure that didn’t happen though.
He kept hold of her, and he got her moving away from the interview room. Grace followed along, and none of them said anything else until they were in her office and the door was shut.
“Sit down,” Grace ordered, and she went to the mini fridge in the corner of her office to get a bottle of water. She opened it and had Livvy drink some before she sat behind her desk.
Ethan took the chair next to Livvy, and he continued to keep his arm around her. Steadying her. Once again, he was there for her.
“What makes you think you killed this woman?” Grace asked.
Livvy took in another long breath. Maybe it was Ethan or the exhaustion, but she felt an odd sort of peace come over her.
She had remembered something.
Something real, something from her actual past. Despite what she had recalled, it felt like, well, progress. The trouble was this was no doubt the tip of the proverbial iceberg, and the next thing she remembered might not be sitting in a stairwell at New Hope.
It might be plunging a knife into someone.
“I obviously knew her,” Livvy said as she tried to answer Grace’s question. “She was on the stairs with me. We were sort of cowering there, I suppose.” She stopped and glanced at the way Ethan’s arm was looped around her. “Sort of like this.”
“With the woman comforting you?” Grace suggested.
Livvy considered that, and then she had to shake her head. “I can’t be certain, but in that flash of an image, I’m holding a knife. And I think it was the one that Vernice brought in.”
Ethan and Grace stayed quiet a moment. “Were you afraid of the woman? Did you think she was going to harm you?” he asked.
Livvy knew where he was going with this. If she had stabbed her, he wanted it to be self-defense. And maybe it had been.
“I’m not sure if I was scared of her or just the situation we were in,” she had to admit again. “I think we were hiding from something or someone, but why would I have had the knife? As an adult, why didn’t she have it?”
“Plenty of reasons,” Ethan was quick to say, and he proceeded to name some possibilities. “You’d found it. Or grabbed it because you were terrified. The woman could have given it to you to hold because she had a different kind of weapon, maybe even a gun. There’s also the possibility that it might not have even been a real knife or the one that Vernice brought us.”
“All of that could be true,” Livvy admitted. But even if she hadn’t used the knife to attack someone or defend herself, there were still other questions. She voiced two of them. “Who was the woman, and why were the two of us at New Hope?”
“Franklin might be able to answer that,” Grace remarked.
