Chapter 18 #2
“I’m so sorry. I didn’t know we were coming here until we pulled in. I would never ask for your help,” Valerie said to me.
She was thinner than in the pictures I’d seen before. No, thinner wasn’t the right word. Gaunt. Older too than the twenty-six she should be now. Either the profile pictures I’d seen were years old or she’d aged drastically. Good. I hoped it was the guilt eating her alive.
“Then we’re on the same page, because I would never offer it,” I said coldly.
“Gage,” Laura snapped. “Stop being a dick.”
“Dick!” the little girl said before happily sharing her sugar cookie with Nana.
“No, it’s fine. I absolutely deserve it,” Valerie said, looking nervously toward the door.
“You don’t,” Laura insisted before turning back to me. “I want you to defend Valerie against her charges.”
My laugh was humorless. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”
A child’s peal of laughter rang out, startling in its discord with what was happening in this room.
“Give us a minute, Valerie,” Laura said, giving the woman’s hand a squeeze before pushing past me into the conference room.
Laura waited for me to close the door before turning to face me, breathing fire.
“I brought her here to you because I trusted that you, out of everyone in the family, would do the right thing.”
“What’s the right thing here, Laur? That woman ruined your fucking life, and you want me to do what? Make sure she doesn’t pay the consequences? What the hell is wrong with you? She killed Miller.” I pointed at the framed photo of Miller in his army dress blues on the bookcase.
“Do you honestly think I don’t know that, you jackass? Do you think there’s a second of any day that goes by that I don’t miss him?”
“Then why? What the fuck is this?”
My sister took an exaggerated inhale that I knew was her attempt to rein in her temper.
It never worked. “We talked. It started a few months after the accident. She reached out. At first I didn’t really want to hear anything she had to say.
But she didn’t give me any excuses. Just apologies. She was fucking devastated, Gage.”
“Good. Welcome to the fucking club.”
“She’d just gotten off a twelve-hour night shift as an ICU nurse. Her baby—that baby,” she said, pointing through the glass to the little girl in the waiting room, “had kept her husband up all night because she was teething.”
“I don’t want to hear any of this.” I didn’t want to humanize the woman who’d taken everything from my sister. She was a criminal, a monster, deserving of punishment.
“Well, tough shit, because I had to live through it, so the least you can fucking do is listen.”
I held up my hands in an angry, wordless surrender.
“She packed the baby and their toddler in the car to take them out to pick up breakfast so her husband could get some sleep. The sun was rising. The baby was crying at the top of her lungs. Valerie was trying to keep it together.”
I didn’t want to see the picture she was painting, because I knew how it ended.
“The toddler threw her pacifier at Valerie and started screaming. Val took her eyes off the road for one second to reach for the pacifier, and that was it.”
I pressed the heels of my hands into my eyes.
It. The end of a life. The end of normal. The beginning of an emptiness that could never be filled.
“She put you in a wheelchair, Laur. She killed Miller,” I said quietly. The strongest, bravest, funniest man I knew.
“It was a goddamn horrible accident. And she’s the only other person in this world who knows exactly how horrific all those minutes were before the first responders showed up.”
I opened my mouth to argue, but she cut me off.
“No. Gage. She held my hand in that ditch while I screamed for Miller. While her babies cried in the car.” A single angry tear carved its way down her cheek.
“I thought you didn’t remember.” My throat felt like I’d swallowed a pack of razor blades.
“It was easier for me if none of you knew. I remember enough.”
“Christ, Laur.”
“I know that we all lost something on the side of the road that day. Part of her died there too, and I will not let another family lose another parent over this. She’s paid every second of every day since then.
She had to leave her job because of panic attacks.
Her husband is divorcing her. She’s lost enough.
It was one second, one tiny mistake, Gage.
So if you want to do the right thing, if you want an action item on your to-do list that will actually make my life better, you’ll do this for me. ”
“Laura, she doesn’t even want me to take her case,” I said wearily. I felt like the world was a carousel spinning out of control. I felt like instead of continuing on the straight line I’d planned, I’d just run face-first into a brick wall.
“Because she thinks she deserves to lose more.”
“Yeah? Well, so do I.”
“I need you to get the fuck over that, Gage, and do your goddamn job. For me.”
“You’re asking a hell of a lot,” I said.
She reached over and gripped my wrist. “I know I am. Just like I know you’re going to do it, so you might as well skip over this moral outrage part.”
“She deserves to be punished,” I insisted. It had been the only thing to keep me going in the early days. A law had been broken, a crime committed. Justice would be served.
“What about me?” Laura demanded, pointing at herself.
“I was the one who suggested we run on the road because there were puddles on the shoulder. Miller was running on the line behind me because I didn’t want to get my new sneakers muddy.
Do you know how that memory ate me alive for months after the accident?
I didn’t even need the miles that day. I could have gone the next morning.
I had more time then, and Miller wanted to sleep in.
But I wanted to get the training session checked off the list. That’s why Miller’s dead. ”
“That’s bullshit. He died because that woman carelessly got behind the wheel with a bunch of distractions in the back seat.”
“I need you to do this for me, Gigi. You can’t bring Miller back, but you can sure as hell make sure that little girl doesn’t lose her mother.”
“Sometimes you’re the fucking worst, and I hate that I can’t tell you that often enough anymore because of all the shit that’s happened.”
Her smile was quick, sharp. “I can still kick your ass any day, little brother.”
“Fuck you.”
“No, fuck you.”
“I can’t say yes. Yet,” I added when her eyes narrowed. “Let me talk to her, and then let me think about it.”
“Fine. But you have to be polite, and you only have until Monday to decide. She needs to enter a plea at the preliminary hearing.”
Fuck. This was a big decision, and I never made those on the fly. I’d always weighed my options, talked through all the possible outcomes. I looked at Miller’s picture again. He’d been the voice of wisdom, a sympathetic ear, and a shoulder to lean on.
I’d never get to go to him for advice again. Because of the woman in my waiting room.
“I love you, Gigi,” Laura said quietly.
“You’ve got a funny way of showing it,” I complained.
“I know that I’m asking a lot of you, but I’m only doing it because I know you can handle it. Also, I’m going to need your help when I start inviting Valerie and the kids to family dinners, because you know Cam is going to lose his shit.”
I swiped a hand over my face. “Fuck me.”
“I’m going to send her in and rescue Declan from Tilly the Terror. Don’t be a dick,” Laura warned. She pointed two fingers at her eyes and then at me before wheeling back into the waiting room.
“Fuck,” I muttered, staring blankly into my empty coffee mug, wishing it was full of bourbon.
The tentative knock on the doorframe drew my attention. Valerie stood at the threshold, looking like she was about to be sick.
I stood and gestured for her to take a seat. “Sit.” There was a bite to my tone that I couldn’t quite control.
She closed the door and took a chair that gave her a direct line of sight into the waiting room, where my sister was allowing the sticky-fingered Tilly to feed her crumbled pieces of cookie.
“You don’t have to do this. You shouldn’t do this,” she said in a rush. “I already told Laura that I’m going to plead guilty. I had no idea she was bringing me here to you.”
I got a bottle of water out of the mini fridge and put it on the table in front of her before taking the seat across from her.
I was an adult, a goddamn professional. I could sit through this horrific five-minute interview and send her on her way. I was going to say no. I already knew that. Laura couldn’t fault me for it forever, and the rest of the family would have my back. This woman had taken too much from us.
“Why don’t you start at the beginning? Tell me about that day,” I said.
She fiddled with the bottle. “I had a plan. After my shift, I was going to make breakfast, start the laundry, sleep until three, and then make cupcakes with the girls for my husband’s birthday the next day.
We had a meeting at the bank before my next shift to talk about a loan so we could buy a house since we were outgrowing our rental. ”
She paused and opened her water to take a drink.
“But when I got home, it was chaos. My husband was just coming off the flu and was exhausted because Tilly had kept him up all night. The dishwasher had stopped mid-cycle. Molly, my oldest daughter, was begging me to play dollies with her. I told her I would after breakfast. I had a list of things that needed to be accomplished before fun.”
Valerie stopped and pressed her fingers to her mouth, eyes glassy with tears that I didn’t have empathy for.
“I would give anything now if I’d made the choice to sit on the floor and play dollies with my daughter for ten minutes. Anything. If I’d been a better mom, more focused on the present moment than some stupid list of responsibilities, Miller would still be here.”
The sound of my brother-in-law’s name from the mouth of the woman who’d cost him his life was almost too much for me to take.
He’d been closer in age to Cam and Levi, so they had more history, but we’d had our own bond.
I was the one he’d asked to take care of his family while he was deployed.
I’d promised him I’d make sure they had everything they needed.
“What happened next?” I asked evenly.
She swallowed hard. “I loaded the girls up in the car, told my husband to go back to sleep. I was going to stop by the grocery store and then pick up breakfast and get the girls out of his hair. An hour, I thought, was all it would cost me. But it cost so much more.”
“So you’re in the car with your daughters,” I prompted without emotion. But my heart was hammering behind my ribs, knowing I was about to hear the person responsible for my brother-in-law’s death describe exactly how she’d ended his life.
She nodded and took another drink. “The sun was up but low in the sky. You know how it flashes through the trees like a strobe? I forgot my sunglasses. I had the radio on and was singing to the girls. Tilly was crying, because at that point in her life, Tilly was always crying. Molly was fine for the first few minutes, but she started to have big feelings about being in her car seat. She took out her pacifier and threw it. My husband always said she had an arm on her. It landed in the front seat, and she started crying. I was exhausted. It had been a tough shift, a tough night. And I was about to break down in tears with my daughters. I needed the peace. So I reached for the pacifier.”
She looked up at me for the first time, square in the eye.
“It wasn’t my daughter’s fault. It was mine. I should have stayed home and played dollies. I should have remembered my sunglasses. I should have been able to withstand ten minutes of my own children crying. But I didn’t do any of those things, and your family paid the ultimate price for it.”
She slumped back in her chair, fingers toying with the bottle cap.
“I didn’t see them,” she whispered. “But I will never forget the sound, the feel, the knowledge of what I’d just done. How everything that I’d thought was so important one minute earlier was now meaningless.”
She was crying now, silent tears slipping down her cheeks. She didn’t even bother to wipe them away, like she’d resigned herself to their presence long ago.
“I’m so very sorry.” Her words were barely audible.
I cleared my throat to dislodge the emotions that had taken roost. “Look, Valerie. Despite whatever my sister told you, I can’t give you an answer today. I need to think about this. All of it.”
“I understand, and I’m fully expecting you to say no.
Just the fact that you’re willing to think about it is more than I deserve.
I know you probably don’t want to hear anything from me, and I certainly can’t blame you for that.
But Laura loves you. And she’s proud of you.
She’s told me a lot about your whole family and how you’ve all been there for her through this.
” Another tear escaped, but again she didn’t brush it away.
“It’s something special when you have a family that’s so supportive like that,” she said.
“You should go now,” I said, abruptly getting up from the table.