Chapter 42
I stood in Pullman’s office, feeling impatient.
It had been a week since everything happened, and things were starting to settle.
Hazel was back home, and my father was making arrangements to rent an apartment in Palm Beach Gardens for them, finally ready to sell the house.
Both of them had decided it was the best course of action.
Hazel needed a fresh start. A new school and a new environment.
And Palm Beach Gardens was only twenty-five minutes away from the old house, close enough for her to still visit her friends and the McColloughs.
Plus, it was closer to where my mother lived, who wanted to start visiting Hazel more frequently.
I was planning on going back to Manhattan the next day. My flight was booked for the afternoon. I needed some distance from all of this. And tragedy or not, I was on deadline for my next book proposal, and I needed to get back home and work on it.
But Pullman had texted me as soon as I woke up to ask if I could stop by the police station sometime today, refusing to tell me what it was about. He’d now kept me waiting for thirty minutes.
Pullman held up his hands as he finally opened the door. “I’m late, I know,” he said.
He was wearing a suit, light gray and more fitted than his usual.
It looked designer. Maybe he had been on TV today or at a press conference.
It occurred to me that our family’s tragedy had probably made his career, something that wasn’t unfamiliar to me as the best-selling author of The Smileys Next Door.
He ignored the annoyed look on my face. “How are you holding up?” he asked.
It was such a loaded and simplistic question that I didn’t know how to answer it. How did you explain the overwhelming anger and grief and regret and sense of closure that came with a situation like this?
“I’m okay,” I said. “Considering.”
“You did the right thing,” he said. “Alexandria and Hazel deserved justice.”
“I know.” I took a deep breath. “So is he … okay?” I needed to ask but also didn’t want to know the answer. It felt like opening a drawer my mind had tried to lock.
“He’s … talking. He seems to have accepted what’s going on and is very cooperative. For Will’s sake.”
“That’s good, I guess.” I both did and didn’t want Tommy to suffer. It was hard to make sense of my feelings toward him anymore.
“Thank you for driving over,” Pullman said. “I brought you something, but it’s a little unorthodox.”
I raised an eyebrow as the door to his office opened. A uniformed officer was escorting someone behind them. Someone in a faded brown uniform. There were cuffs secured around his wrists. I stopped, unable to move or breathe. Will.
“Thank you, Officer Stevens. I’ve got him from here. I’ll bring him back to you in ten minutes, all right?” Pullman nodded at the officer, who went to stand outside the door.
Pullman took a key off of his ring, unlocking Will’s cuffs, as we exchanged excited looks. “I had to pull a lot of strings for this, so please don’t jump out the window, okay? Because it’s my ass on the line. I’m going to sit right there …” He gestured to a chair on the other side of the room.
“Will,” I said, unable to believe that he was here, unshackled. I had visited him in prison, but this felt different. For the first time in over a decade, I could hug him.
Will smiled, a sight I realized I’d forgotten. “Hey, Rosebud.”
I threw myself into his arms, burrowing my face into his shoulder as his arms wrapped around me. The feeling was overwhelming, a hug so wildly overdue.
“What are you doing here?” I asked, crying into his shoulder.
“Pullman thought you might need a pick-me-up,” Will said, chuckling. He dropped his voice. “He was concerned about you. I think he might, like, like you, Rosie,” he teased.
“Shut up,” I said, smacking Will playfully as we broke apart. Over his shoulder, Pullman was watching our interaction with a subtle smile. His eyes locked on mine.
I’d deal with that later. I turned back to my brother. It was like looking at a ghost. For eleven years, I hadn’t seen Will outside of the prison walls or a courtroom.
“I wish this reunion were under better circumstances,” I whispered.
“You and me both,” Will said bitterly.
“How are you holding up?” I asked. We’d talked on the phone since Tommy’s admission but it had been brief. We hadn’t gotten into any of the details. It was all too fresh.
“How do you think?” Will’s lip quivered as he fought tears. “I spent all those years in jail for something I didn’t do, after losing one of the people I cared about most in the world, just to find out my own brother did it?” I flinched, and Will reached out to hold my hand in his.
I looked down at his uniform, really seeing it for the first time.
“You know we’re going to get you out, right?
I’ve been on the phone with everyone from Tallahassee to DC all week.
” It turned out getting the wrongfully convicted out of prison was a lengthy process, even when you had an alternate suspect.
Will looked a little sad. “These things can take years, Rosie. I’ll be lucky if you’re not in your thirties by the time I get out.”
I rolled my eyes. “The prison-industrial complex is so completely fucked.”
Will squeezed my hand. “It’s okay. Our good friend Pullman over here told me he’s going to help you work on my release.”
I looked back at Pullman with disbelief. I cocked an eyebrow. “Is he now?”
“Yes, I’m going to make it my mission to single-handedly restore Rose Dearling’s belief in the criminal justice system,” Pullman said.
Will and I laughed in tandem.
“Good luck with that,” I said.
Will and I had only ten minutes together before the rest of my family joined us.
Pullman had called them too. My parents and Hazel each hugged Will and comforted him.
There were a lot of whispered apologies for not believing him or me.
And Will, being Will, was loving and gracious through it all.
My mother hugged him the longest, crying as she asked for forgiveness over and over in his ear.
She didn’t move until my father physically removed her for his turn.
She let him and made her way to me. I was standing off to the side.
“Rose,” she said carefully, wiping at her tears. “I’m not going to lie and say that I agree with every method you took over the years …”
“But?” I added, and a small smile appeared on her face.
“But …” she said. “I acknowledge that you were right, and that if I had been more open to listening to you, there might’ve been a world where it didn’t need to come to this. I’m willing to admit my faults.”
These were the words I had waited eleven years to hear her say. But they didn’t feel like vindication now. After everything that had happened, I didn’t want to be right. Or to fight with her anymore. I just wanted to fix it all. Everything I could, apart from Tommy.
No one could fix what he had done.
“It’s okay,” I told her, letting my mother pull me into a hug.
“Thank you,” she said finally, hugging me tighter. “For helping your brother. Especially when I couldn’t.”
I nodded, and when we broke apart, I watched her go back to Will, wrapping him in her arms again.
My family had a long road ahead of us. A road full of therapy and reconciliation, but it was possible. I was going to make damn sure.