Chapter 17 #2
She rolled her shoulders like she could shrug off the memory.
It clearly didn’t work. “I was a wet-behind-the-ears newbie and definitely not lead on the case. I was the grunt. But a week before trial, the senior lead had a stroke. Rather than risk requesting a continuance so additional counsel could be brought up to speed, the DA let me take it on. I bulldogged it. Got the conviction. A monster got put away, and we’d made the world safer. ”
She took another sip of the whiskey. “Fast forward to a few months ago. A civil rights attorney decided to examine old convictions handled by the lead detective on that case. She found… inconsistencies. Patterns. Witnesses who recanted under oath, saying they’d been pressured to identify a suspect they weren’t sure of.
Alternate leads that were never followed.
Reports that never made it into the file. ”
The muscle in my jaw ticked as I worked out the implications. “He buried exculpatory evidence.”
“Yeah.” Her mouth twisted. “He buried a lot of things. Including a tip, in my case, suggesting someone else had been seen near the victim’s building that night.
Someone whose M.O. matched another unsolved assault three neighborhoods over.
A tip he never told me about. One that never made it into my file. ”
My stomach went cold. I’d seen this movie. Too many times. Bad cops with tunnel vision. Or worse.
“The conviction was overturned?” I asked, even though I knew the answer.
“Overturned and vacated,” she said. “The man I’d prosecuted walked out of prison. He’d lost five years of his life. His marriage. His job. His health. Because I believed the wrong person. Because I believed the system was infallible if I just worked hard enough inside it.”
She swallowed hard, eyes shining. “I stood in court and listened to that judgment read. I watched him look at me. He didn’t yell.
He didn’t curse. He didn’t even ask for an apology.
He just… looked. Like I was one more cop who’d ruined his life and was going to go home afterward and sleep like a damned baby. ”
“You didn’t,” I said quietly.
“No.” Her laugh was wrecked. “I didn’t.”
She scrubbed a hand over her face, careful not to smear her eyeliner.
“The media had a field day,” she said. “Poster child for prosecutorial overreach. How many other cases did she screw up? How many innocent men are behind bars because of her? It didn’t matter that I’d prosecuted in good faith.
That I didn’t know about the withheld tip.
In their eyes, I was part of the problem. ”
“And in your eyes?”
She stared at me, and this time there was no shield at all.
Merely naked, exhausted honesty. “In my eyes, I was the problem. Because I didn’t ask enough questions.
I didn’t push hard enough on the gaps in the detective’s story.
I wanted the narrative to be clean and righteous, so I didn’t dig into the gray.
I bulldogged that case because I trusted the badge and the system behind it.
Because I needed justice to be something I could hold up and say, ‘See, Gwen? This is what should have happened for you.’”
That was the bone-deep root.
She sucked in a breath. “So when you ask why I believed Carson back then, that’s why.
Because my whole world was built around authority being right.
Because this island needed a villain, and he handed them one.
You.” She flinched at the word. “And I needed to believe the adults in charge weren’t going to fail us.
Because if they did, if justice could be that wrong, then Gwen was gone and nobody paid for it.
And I couldn’t—” Her voice broke. “I couldn’t live with that. ”
The confession hung between us, raw and bleeding.
I sat with it. With her. She hadn’t been obligated to confess any of this. Not to me. Maybe especially not to me. But here we were, with her sitting broken open, with her mistakes on the table between us.
“You know what the shitty part is?” I said after a minute. “I get it.”
She blinked. “You… do?”
“I was never going to like being on the receiving end of that kind of tunnel vision,” I said. “But I understand the part where you needed the story to make sense. Where you needed there to be a monster whose face you could put on the bad thing, so it didn’t all feel… pointless.”
She laughed weakly. “That doesn’t excuse it.”
“No,” I agreed. “It doesn’t. But it explains it. There’s a difference.”
She picked up her glass again and set it back down without drinking. Her hand shook.
“It’s happening again,” she whispered. “That same blind spot. That same willingness to take the easy out instead of living with uncertainty. Carson decides Priya ‘just went home,’ and everyone breathes a sigh of relief. No more missing posters. No more press conferences. No more having to look at the fact that a girl is gone and nobody knows where. And I can’t help wondering if he did the same thing thirteen years ago.
With you. If he had other leads and he simply… didn’t bother.”
I thought of Willie, cold on the bathroom floor. I thought of Carson’s face at the apartment, wary and irritated in equal measure. Not grieving. Not shaken.
“Would you be surprised?” I asked.
“No. And that might be the worst part.” Her shoulders hunched, as if she were bracing against a blow I didn’t intend to deliver.
“I’m sorry,” she blurted suddenly. “Not just in that vague ‘sorry I believed the wrong thing’ way. I’m sorry I never questioned the story.
I’m sorry I didn’t look at you and think, ‘Wait. This is a kid I know. A boy my cousin trusted. Maybe I should examine this a little more critically instead of accepting the narrative that makes my fear easier to carry.’”
Her breath shuddered out. “I’m sorry I failed you. And Gwen. And all the people I put away without seeing the ways the system could crush them.”
The words hit harder than I expected. Something in my chest that had been calcified for years gave a reluctant crack.
So many people would’ve taken this and buried it in the name of retaining their sense of self identity. But not Madden. No, she dug all the way down to the ugly truth of it because it was important to her that she do better.
I respected the hell out of her for that.
The system would’ve been a lot better off if more people were brave enough to do that self-examination.
I exhaled slowly. “You can’t change what you did at seventeen or twenty-eight. Or any of it. You can only change what you do now.”
She looked up at me, eyes wet. “And what am I doing now, Rios? Besides chasing ghosts and harassing a police chief who’d rather I vanish in a puff of smoke than keep asking questions?”
“You’re doing the thing the system failed to do,” I said. “You’re looking at the gray. You’re refusing to take the easy answer when it doesn’t fit the evidence. You’re putting your faith somewhere better than a badge or a title.”
“Where?” she asked, almost desperate.
“In the work,” I said simply. “In the questions. In the people who’ve proven they’ll bleed for the truth.”
Her gaze searched mine. “You mean you.”
Yeah, and that meant more to me than I was ready to analyze, so I pressed on. “And you.”
The silence that followed was dense and charged.
She broke eye contact first, scrubbing at one cheek with the heel of her hand in a gesture that was more frustrated than vain. “I don’t know how to not be angry. At them. At myself. At…everything.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I’m familiar with that particular flavor of rage.”
She huffed out something that might have been a laugh if you tilted your head and squinted. “How do you live with it?”
I studied the proud line of her spine and the tension around her mouth. The familiar exhaustion in her eyes.
“Badly sometimes,” I said. “Better when I’m not doing it alone.”
She looked back down at her empty glass. “I don’t really know how to not do things alone.”
“I noticed,” I said dryly.
Her lips twitched.
I hesitated for half a second before deciding to hell with it. “Can I ask you a weird question?”
“Compared to what we’ve already covered?” she asked. “Shoot.”
“When’s the last time somebody gave you a hug?”
Her head jerked up. “What?”
“Hug,” I repeated. “You know. Arms. Squeezing. Human contact that isn’t hostile cross-examination.”
She blinked. “I—why does that matter?”
“Because you found a dead man today, went toe-to-toe with a hostile cop, and confessed one of your biggest professional failures to the guy your hometown wanted to lynch, and you’re sitting here holding yourself together with sheer spite.
That’s impressive. It’s also exhausting.
And sometimes the thing you need isn’t another drink or another argument.
It’s somebody else holding some of the weight for a minute. ”
Her throat worked. “I’m fine.”
“Bullshit.”
Her eyes flashed. “I don’t need—”
“I didn’t say you needed it,” I cut in. “I asked when the last time you had it was.”
She opened her mouth. Closed it. Looked away. “I don’t remember.” Her answer was so quiet I almost didn’t hear it.
Something in my chest twisted. “Can I give you one?”
Her head snapped back toward me. “Why?”
“Because you look like you’re about to shatter. And because I’m very good at this particular form of first aid.”
She let out a strangled sound that might’ve been half laugh, half sob. “You’re serious.”
“Deadly. If you say no, I’ll respect that. But the offer stands.”
She stared at me for a long beat, every line of her body broadcasting resistance. Independence. The fierce, lonely pride of somebody who’d learned early that needing anything from anyone was dangerous.
Slowly, she stood.
My pulse kicked up. I rose too, giving her plenty of space. Letting her close the distance if she chose.
For a second, she only stood there, fists clenched at her sides, breathing like she was about to go into a courtroom instead of a hug. “This is stupid.”
“Probably,” I agreed. “A lot of the best things are.”
Her mouth quirked despite herself. With visible effort, she took one step forward. Then another. Until she was close enough that I could feel the heat of her. She hesitated again. I kept my arms loose at my sides, open invitation instead of demand.
“Just… don’t say anything,” she said.
“Scout’s honor.”
She made a soft, annoyed noise before she stepped into my space and pressed herself against my chest, arms coming up in a quick, almost defensive wrap around my ribs.
I closed my arms around her. Not too tight. Just enough.
She was stiff as a board for a full five seconds. Then ten. At last, with a quiet, shaky exhale, something in her gave way. Her shoulders dropped. Her forehead tucked under my jaw. Her fingers uncurling from fists to flat palms against my back.
That subtle surrender hit harder than any punch I’d ever taken.
I felt it like a tectonic shift—that moment when someone who doesn’t trust easily puts themselves, literally, in your arms. A weight settling against me that wasn’t physical so much as… soul-deep.
I couldn’t quite stop myself from tucking my cheek against her hair. “Got you.”
She didn’t answer. But her grip tightened.
We stood like that for a long moment. The boat creaked. The world continued outside—waves and wind and distant engines—but inside the Second Wind, it was only the two of us and the sound of our breathing.
Eventually, her arms loosened. She stepped back, blinking fast, jaw clenched like she could force every emotion back into its box by sheer will.
“Thank you,” she said, voice rough.
“Any time,” I said.
She huffed. “Don’t say that if you don’t mean it. I might take you up on it.”
“Good,” I said. “I’d rather you take me up on a hug than on, say, beating the shit out of Carson in a grocery store aisle.”
Her laugh came out more genuine that time. “Tempting.”
“Extremely. But I like you out of jail.”
Her eyes searched my face again, softer now. “I’m still mad at myself,” she said. “And at the system. And at Carson.”
“Good,” I said. “Stay mad. Just don’t let it blind you again.”
She nodded, slow. “I’m trying.”
“I can tell.”
I stepped back, giving her space again. Letting the air cool between us, even though every cell in my body was suddenly, acutely aware of her. The way she smelled—soap and salt and something warm and feminine. The way she’d felt, solid and small at the same time, pressed against me.
Dangerous, that awareness.
I cleared my throat. “All right,” I said. “You need a nap and a snack, and we need reinforcements.”
Her mouth quirked in amusement. “Do I?”
“You do. Find that snack and have a lie down. I’ll get everyone together and figure out when and where we’re meeting.”
“You’re very bossy for a man with no authority,” she muttered.
“Comes from being right a lot,” I said.
She rolled her eyes, but there was no real heat in it. “Fine. I’ll try to sleep. Call me when you’ve got details.”
“I will.”
I headed for the door, pausing there with my hand on the frame.
“Madden?”
“Yeah?”
“You didn’t fail me today,” I said. “Whatever else you think you’ve done in the past—you didn’t fail me today.”
Something flickered over her face. “Don’t you dare start making it easy to like you, Carrera,” she said softly. “I don’t have the bandwidth for that.”
I flashed a quick grin. “Too late.” And stepped out onto the dock before I could see her reaction.