22. Ryan #3
Arthur waits until Ally has steadied, and then he walks her through the days. Friday — Jane kept both kids home, because all three of them were bruised and she wouldn’t let anyone see them like that. Saturday, quiet. Sunday, when Roman told her the Switzerland plan had changed.
“Tell the court what the original plan was.”
“He’d already pulled me out of Edgewood and enrolled me at a boarding school in Switzerland. L’Institut Sainte-Catherine, in Vevey. I was supposed to leave April sixth.”
“Had you chosen that school? Applied there? Agreed to leave Edgewood at all?”
“No.” She looks at Roman. “None of it. I wasn’t being sent to school. I was being shipped somewhere I’d have no one, so that Victor could collect me with nobody around who’d notice or care.”
“What had your father already arranged, without your consent?”
“Everything. Enrollment. My medical paperwork. My passport. A private flight. Someone to drive me after I landed.” Her voice hardens. “It was already done. All of it. Around me, over me, without one word to me.”
“And what did he tell you Sunday?”
“That April sixth was gone. That I’d be leaving that Saturday instead.”
I remember that text. I remember reading it three times in a row because my brain flat-out refused to accept that a whole week had just vanished.
“How did you react?”
“I panicked.”
“Why?”
“Because we weren’t ready.” Arthur doesn’t ask who we is.
He knows. The whole room can guess. “I knew people were trying to help us. I knew getting Tobias out clean was complicated — that I could walk out because I’m eighteen, but I couldn’t just take a six-year-old across state lines without handing my father a kidnapping charge and losing him for good.
We needed time to do it right. And Sunday, all our time disappeared. ”
“Let’s move to Monday.” Arthur flips a page. “Did anything unusual happen at school?”
“No. School was normal. It was afterward.” Her face changes again, going tight. “When I got home, Dad and Victor were both there. And Victor told me the plan had changed again. That we were leaving Friday.”
“Who was leaving Friday?”
“Victor and me.”
“Your mother?”
“No.”
“Tobias?”
“No.”
“Your father?”
“No.”
Four small words, and every one of them is a door closing. Arthur lets them hang.
“What did Mr. Tremblay say the two of you would be doing?”
“He said he wanted time alone with me before Switzerland. That he’d make a trip out of it. Shopping. Dinner. A few days, just us, before he dropped me at the school.”
My jaw locks so hard my teeth hurt. Dad’s hand closes around my forearm. I haven’t moved. He does it anyway, because he knows exactly what I want to do.
“What did that mean to you?”
Ally has gone pale. “That I was out of time. That whatever we were going to do, it had to be before Friday, or it was never happening.”
“Did something happen with your mother while Roman and Victor were outside?”
“Yes.” Her eyes drop. “Mom pulled me upstairs. Fast. Like she’d been waiting for a chance. And she showed me everything she’d hidden.”
Arthur’s team opens another binder. Ally looks toward it, and her face does something complicated — grief and pride tangled together.
“Photographs. Notes. Names, dates. Things she’d overheard him say on the phone over years. Things he’d done. Things he was part of. She’d been collecting it the whole time. Quietly. For years. In a place he’d never look, because he thought she was too beaten down to do anything but survive him.”
“What did she tell you to do with it?”
“Get it out of the house.” Ally’s voice breaks clean in half. “She said if anything ever happened to her, somebody had to know. She said it like—“ She stops. Swallows. “She said it like she already knew what was coming.”
My chest caves in. Because that’s the part I can’t get past. Jane knew.
Maybe not the exact moment, not the marble, not that night specifically.
But she stood in front of her daughter and handed over years of evidence and told her to get it out in case something happened to me, and then twenty minutes later she put her own body between Roman and her children and it did.
“What did you do?”
“I photographed as much as I could. I couldn’t take the originals — he’d have noticed. So I took pictures with my phone, page after page, as fast as I could.”
“Where did you send them?”
“To you. Immediately. Everything, as I shot it.”
“What happened afterward?”
“Dad knew something was wrong.” Ally rubs her palms down her dress. “He kept watching me. Watching Mom. Asking questions in that voice. I was terrified he could see it on us. So I texted Ryan.”
My heart kicks, three weeks too late. I can still see the message. I can still feel the exact second my whole body went cold. All three, Ryan.
“What were you trying to tell him?”
“That it was happening. That we needed help, right then, not in a week.”
“Did help come?”
“Yes.” Her eyes find mine across the whole room and hold. “Ryan came. Walter. Arthur. All of them. Everyone came.”
I hold her eyes and try to put my whole self into it. I’d come again. I’d come a thousand times. I’ll always come.
Roman shifts at the defense table. The officer behind him straightens.
Arthur’s voice stays perfectly level, which is its own kind of terrifying. “When your father realized people had come to help you and your mother leave — how did he respond?”
“He lost it.”
Ally’s hands start to shake in her lap. I want to get up so badly my legs are burning with it. I don’t. I fucking don’t.
“He was screaming at everyone to get off his property. Victor was screaming at me to come with him. Tobias was crying. And Mom kept trying to keep Tobias behind her, kept putting her body in front of his.”
Arthur takes one step closer. “Take your time.”
Ally nods. Breathes. “And then my dad realized Mom was the one who’d given me the evidence.”
Roman’s attorney is on his feet. “Objection. Speculation.”
Arthur doesn’t even fully turn around. “Her testimony will establish what Mr. O’Toole said and did in the moments immediately after.”
The judge looks at Ally, not unkindly. “You may testify to what you personally saw and heard, Ms. O’Toole.”
“Yes, Your Honor.” She looks back at Arthur, and now there’s something in her face that wasn’t there before. She’s decided something. “He turned on her. He asked her what she’d done. He asked what she’d given me. And Mom told him to leave us alone.”
The tears are streaming now, but her voice has gone strangely steady, like she’s holding it level by pure will. “And he started screaming. And then he went after her.”
“What did you see your father do?”
Ally looks at Roman. And this time — this time she doesn’t look away. Neither does he. For once, he has to sit there and take it.
“He grabbed her. She fought him. She told him he didn’t get to scare us anymore.”
I can hear Jane’s voice. Three weeks later I can still hear her screaming it into that yard. You don’t get to scare us anymore.
“He told her to shut up. And she said no.” Ally’s breath drags in wrong, catching on the way down. “She just kept saying no.”
Mom beside me is crying without any sound at all. Dad has an arm around her and his other hand comes to rest on the back of my neck, heavy and grounding, because he can feel me starting to shake apart. I’m gripping the edge of the bench hard enough that my fingers have gone white and numb.
“What happened next, Alison?”
“He grabbed her by both shoulders.” Ally’s face crumples, and her voice drops to almost nothing, and the whole room leans in to catch it. “And he threw her down.”
The courtroom disappears. I’m back there. White marble. Jane. The blood. Ally screaming a sound I will hear for the rest of my life.
“Where?”
“The stairs.” A pause. “The front steps. Marble.”
“Did she fall accidentally?”
“No—“
Roman’s attorney is rising. “Objection—“
“No.” Ally’s voice cuts clean through his, sharp enough that the whole room stops. Everyone looks at her. She’s staring at her father, and she is not going to be interrupted, not on this, not by anyone.
“He threw her.”
Arthur doesn’t speak. The judge doesn’t either. Nobody does.
Ally’s tears keep falling and her voice keeps going, low and terrible and absolutely clear. “He grabbed my mom by both shoulders, and he slammed her down onto those stairs. Her head hit the edge of the marble.” I can’t breathe. Dad’s hand tightens on the back of my neck. “And she didn’t move.”
She wipes at her face, but more tears just take the place of the ones she clears, and she stops bothering. “There was blood in her hair. It was spreading out under her head, on the white, and I got down on the ground next to her, and I called her Mom.”
Roman looks away, finally, down at the table.
“She didn’t answer me.” Ally’s eyes stay locked on the side of his face. “So I called her Mommy.”
I close my eyes. One second. That’s all I let myself have. When I open them, Ally is still there. Still in the box. Still sitting up straight and finishing it, somehow still standing even sitting down, and I think she might be the strongest person I have ever known or will ever know.
Arthur gives her all the time she needs. The room gives it to her. Then, gently, he asks the last question of the direct. “Alison. Did you see who killed your mother?”
“Yes.”
“Who?”
She looks at Roman. “My father.”
Arthur turns to the judge. “No further questions, Your Honor.”
I finally breathe. It lasts about thirty seconds.
Then Roman’s attorney stands, and buttons his jacket, and walks toward the witness stand like the last hour didn’t happen.
Like there’s a version of this where he comes out looking like anything but what he is — a man being paid to make an eighteen-year-old relive her mother’s murder and then imply she made it up.
“Ms. O’Toole. You testified that you were afraid of your father.”
“Yes.”
“But you lied to him. Regularly.”
Arthur is already up. “Objection. Argumentative.”
“Sustained.”
The attorney doesn’t miss a beat, just changes the wrapping on the same knife. “You maintained a secret romantic relationship for months.”