Chapter 16
HARVEE
The weekend dissolves into bedsheets and DoorDash bags left by the door.
I surface long enough to eat, to use the bathroom, to stare at the ceiling until sleep pulled me back under.
Every time I closed my eyes the night came back in pieces.
Music. Hands. The cold air of the alley. A police car door clicking shut.
Monday morning arrives whether I'm ready for it or not.
I pull into the parking lot five minutes before I'm supposed to clock in, hands still wrapped tight around the steering wheel, and I see the lights before I've fully processed what I'm looking at.
Three patrol cars lined up outside the firm, red and blue washing the glass lobby in slow pulses.
Officers moving in and out. Staff clustered in small groups with their hands over their mouths.
"What the fuck," I whisper.
Donna is visible through the glass doors, face drained of color, eyes too wide. She spots me and jerks her head toward the entrance. My legs feel like wet paper but I make them move.
"Donna." I grab her arm the second I'm through the door. "What is happening?"
"He's dead," she says. Like she still can't make the words fit together correctly.
"Who is dead?"
"Clark." She blinks. "They found him at home this morning. That's all they'll say."
The lobby sounds go muffled. Like something has been placed between me and the room. Clark Turner. Dead. The man who made my skin crawl for two years, the man who won that case on Thursday, the man who sent me a winky face while a family fell apart in a courthouse. Dead.
The room snaps back.
Two officers step toward me before I've finished processing, their presence deliberate and heavy.
"Ma'am. Can we ask you a few questions?"
"Sure, of course, what can I help y'all with?" My voice comes out bright and Southern and helpful and I want to bite my own tongue off.
"Your name?"
"Harvee Holland."
"How well did you know Mr. Turner?"
"I've been his legal assistant for about two years, but I wouldn't say I knew him personally." The words are tumbling out faster than I want them to. My pulse is loud in my ears. Why am I talking this much? Why am I sweating? I didn't do anything. So why does every word feel like evidence?
"What do you mean by that?"
"I honestly — I'm not sure, I'm sorry." A nervous laugh escapes before I can stop it and dies instantly in the silence they're offering me. "I'm just awkward sometimes."
One of them writes something down.
"Where were you this weekend?"
My stomach drops.
Images surface in fragments. Melanie laughing. Club lights. The alley. Cold gravel under my knees. The back of a patrol car, the windshield wipers scraping in the drizzle.
"I stayed home in bed after being dropped off early Saturday morning by one of your officers.
" I watch his pen move. "It's a long story.
I wasn't in any trouble — I think I was with the wrong person and got slipped something.
Your guys took care of me and brought me home and then I didn't leave all weekend. "
Harvee. Stop talking. You sound guilty and you are not guilty. Close your mouth.
I can hear myself spiraling and I cannot stop.
"You stayed home the entire weekend," he repeats. Not a question.
"Yes." I hold his gaze and force myself to stop there.
"We may need to follow up. Can we get your contact information?"
I give them my number and address and watch the pen scratch across the page, each syllable feeling like something being recorded for a purpose I can't see yet. When they finally move away I exhale through my nose and stare at a fixed point on the wall until the lightheadedness passes.
The officers file out. The whole office breathes again, slowly, cautiously, the way a room does when it's not quite sure the danger has passed.
Donna finds me by my desk, voice low.
"Harvee. I heard them say your name earlier." She pauses. "They found his phone. Apparently there's an entire photo album. Of you."
I go still. "What kind of photos."
"Taken without you knowing, from what I could tell." Her expression does something careful and sympathetic that I don't have the capacity to receive right now.
The copy machine. My desk. The hallways. Every time I felt his eyes and looked up and found him already looking away. How many times was he not looking away?
"Fucking disgusting pig," I say, but my voice comes out thinner than I intend it to.
"We all knew it," Donna murmurs. No venom. Just exhaustion and something that looks, uncomfortably, like pity aimed at me.
"The police know about the photos?" I ask.
"I heard one of them say it." She drops her voice further. "They called it motive."
The word lands like a hand around my throat.
Motive. I run the inventory without meaning to.
Two years of harassment documented on his phone.
His texts on Friday night. The invitation I declined.
The fact that I was drunk and disoriented and had to be brought home by an officer the same weekend he died.
Every piece of it individually explainable, collectively damning.
"They're going to think I wanted him dead," I say quietly. "That I finally snapped. Or that I was getting back at him for—" I gesture vaguely at all of it.
"Harvee." Donna puts a hand on my arm. "You didn't do anything."
I nod.
I know I didn't do anything.
So why does it already feel like a verdict?