“But she broke up with him. That kind of rejection can stick with a person.”
“It was high school.”
“Feelings can simmer for a long time, especially when someone’s already demonstrated they have trouble with loss.” Adam’s implication was clear. “Based on the condition of the body and the bear cache, the coroner believes she’d been there for over a day when you found her. She was last seen leaving work Friday night around six o’clock.”
“Poor Sheila.”
“Tyler was seen at the bank where Sheila worked around that same time,” Adam continued. “We can make a solid case.”
He sounded confident. Convinced, even. But Tyler...no, she couldn’t believe it.
“I’m glad we got him before he could hurt you.” Adam reached across the table like he might take her hand, but Brooke pulled back before he could. He set his hand on the table. “When I saw him in here, talking to you, sitting so close...I won’t lie, Brooke. It scared me.”
“He wasn’t going to hurt me.”
“How can you be sure? A man with his history, his pattern of loss and violence—”
“There was no violence with his family,” Brooke interrupted. “The fire was ruled accidental.”
“Officially,” Adam said. “But I was part of that investigation, and I had questions. Questions that were never fully answered. And now we have another woman dead, another person connected to Tyler’s past.”
Brooke’s head spun. Evidence pointed one way. Her instincts pointed another. Phil’s certainty that Tyler was innocent warred with the case Adam was presenting.
After being so catastrophically wrong about Kelsey, could she trust her judgment about people at all? She was starting to wonder.
“You’re safe now,” Adam said. “That’s what matters. Tyler Gillis can’t hurt anyone else.”
But what if Tyler was innocent? What if the real killer was still out there while an innocent man sat in jail?
“I knew something was off about him the first time he was under investigation,” Adam continued. “The way he acted, the things he said...my gut told me he was guilty, even if we couldn’t prove it. Now we have a chance to get justice for Sheila. Maybe even for his wife and child.”
Brooke thought about Tyler’s face when Adam had said Sheila’s name—the genuine shock and grief, the way he’d looked at Brooke as they led him away, pleading for her to believe him.
That hadn’t looked like guilt. It had looked like devastation.
“Listen,” Adam said, his tone shifting to something softer, more personal. “I know this is a lot to process. Finding a body, then discovering someone you were talking to might be the killer, that’s traumatic. Please be sure to take care of yourself, okay?”
She nodded, grateful he was being so good about this. Adam had asked her out on Monday, showing up at the coffee shop not long after the lunch rush. She’d told him she was too shaken up about finding the body and needed time before thinking about dating. He’d said he understood and would ask again when she’d had time to settle.
Even then, Brooke already knew the truth. She didn’t want to date Adam. The attraction wasn’t there, and the interest wasn’t genuine. He was nice enough. Handsometoo. But he wasn’t the man for her. She knew that without a doubt.
What she’d wanted, what she’d been planning since Monday but kept chickening out of, was to talk to Tyler, get to know him better, and give that connection a chance to grow.
And now Tyler was going to jail, accused of murder.
“Remember, I have a list of resources if you need them,” Adam said, standing. “You’ve been through a lot. You still have my card, right? Just let me know.”
“Thank you.”
He left with a final concerned look, and Brooke sagged in her chair as soon as the door closed behind him.
“Brooke.” Becky appeared again, her phone in hand. “You need to see this.”
“What?”
“Social media is blowing up.” Becky turned the phone so Brooke could see the screen.
Posts were flooding in from multiple platforms—photos of the patrol cars outside her coffee shop, speculation about what had happened, and the name Tyler Gillis appearing over and over with varying degrees of accuracy about his history.
