Chapter 56
Catch My Draft
By Saturday night, Eleanor was miserable. The bell over the door at Catch My Draft gave a tired little jangle as April pushed it open with her shoulder.
“Come on,” she said. “You look like you’ve been personally sentenced by Judge Harlan. You need fries and a beer before you turn into dust.”
Eleanor stepped in behind her, blinking as her eyes adjusted from the cool dark of Main Street to the warmer, amber light inside the bar.
It was busy without being loud. A game flickered soundless on the televisions over the bar. Country music hummed under the clatter of glasses and low conversation. Two JVU students argued over darts in the back corner. A couple in hiking fleeces leaned close over a basket of wings near the windows.
Normal.
That, more than anything, made Eleanor want to cry from sheer exhaustion.
April steered them toward a high-top along the wall.
“You’re not allowed to talk about witness prep for at least ten minutes,” she said, sliding onto a stool. “And if you say the word voir dire, I’m leaving you here.”
Eleanor gave a tired huff and sat opposite her.
“I should be home.”
“You should be fed,” April said. “Those are different things.”
Mike the bartender wandered over, and April ordered two drafts and a basket of fries big enough to insult a cardiologist.
When he walked away, Eleanor let her bag rest against the stool leg and rolled her shoulders once, trying to ease out the courthouse stiffness.
April watched her.
“You did good yesterday,” she said.
Eleanor glanced up.
“Deck put you up to that?”
“Deck doesn’t put anybody up to anything. He just mutters darkly and makes you feel undereducated.” April leaned an elbow on the table. “I’m serious. MiMi landed. Daycare teacher landed. You could feel the room shifting.”
“For about ten seconds,” Eleanor said.
April tipped one shoulder.
“Ten seconds is how trials turn.”
Their beers arrived. Eleanor wrapped both hands around the glass before taking a sip. It was cold and bitter and wonderfully ordinary.
For a minute, they sat without speaking. Eleanor could feel her pulse finally beginning to step down from the ledge it had been balancing on since court recessed.
Then April’s eyes moved past her shoulder.
“Well,” she said lightly, “speak of procedural nightmares.”
Eleanor turned.
Reid had just come in with Luke Hale.
Reid was in shirtsleeves, jacket gone, tie loosened just enough to tell on the day he’d had. Luke, beside him, had the look of a man who’d been dragged somewhere under protest and decided to make peace with it.
They paused just inside the doorway.
Reid’s gaze found Eleanor for one brief, dangerous second.
Then he looked away.
He and Luke crossed to the far end of the bar and took a table near the windows.
He never came over.
April watched him go.
“Well,” she said.
Eleanor stared down into her beer.
“It’s probably for the best.”
“For who?”
Eleanor didn’t answer.
April leaned an elbow on the table.
“You look miserable,” she said gently.
“I am miserable.”
The words came out before Eleanor could stop them.
April’s face softened.
“Oh, honey.”
Eleanor looked away.
“I can’t do this anymore,” she said quietly. “The trial. Him. Lila. Charleston showing up in every room I walk into.”
April was silent.
“And then Deck,” Eleanor said, the hurt breaking through at last. “He knew. Maybe not all of it, but enough. Since Charleston.”
April sat back.
“He told you?”
“Tonight.” Eleanor laughed once, bitter and exhausted. “Apparently, everyone’s been protecting me by keeping me in the dark.”
“That doesn’t sound like Deck.”
“No,” Eleanor said. “It sounds exactly like Deck.”
She wrapped both hands around her glass.
“In a room full of people waiting for me to fail, he was the one person I thought was looking at my back.”
April reached across the table and squeezed her wrist.
“He was,” she said. “Because he’s a stubborn old Irishman who thinks carrying pain for people counts as helping. You know—kind of like you. Walking away and calling it protection.”
Eleanor looked toward the far side of the room.
Reid sat with Luke, one hand around a beer bottle, his attention fixed firmly on whatever Luke was saying.
He looked over once.
Just once.
Long enough for her to see the tiredness in his face. The wanting. The same miserable, stubborn ache she was carrying around herself.
Then Luke said something, and Reid looked away again.
And somehow that hurt worse than if he hadn’t looked at all.
“I broke up with him in an alley behind the courthouse,” Eleanor said softly. “And now every time I see him, I keep thinking maybe I made a mistake. Or maybe I didn’t. Maybe there wasn’t any version of this where it didn’t hurt.”
April’s expression went fierce.
“You love him.”
Eleanor shut her eyes.
“That is not helpful.”
“No,” April said. “But it’s true.”
Eleanor opened her eyes again.
“I just want this over,” she whispered. “I want the trial over. I want Lila gone. I want to stop feeling like every person I trust is keeping something from me.”
April squeezed her wrist once more.
“You’re gonna get through it,” she said quietly. “And when you do, you can decide who deserves to still be standing there.”
Their fries arrived. April immediately stole the crispiest one, and Eleanor had just reached for her own when the bell over the door rang again.
She felt the shift before she saw its cause.
Conversations didn’t stop, exactly, but something in the room changed direction.
Lila Grant stepped inside wearing dark jeans, boots, and a pale, fitted sweater under a short jacket. She looked polished in that deliberate not-trying-too-hard way cameras loved. A young producer type came in behind her with a phone rig in one hand and a small bag slung cross-body.
April went very still.
“You have got to be kidding me,” she said.
Lila’s gaze moved easily through the room—bar, booths, dartboard, exits—then landed on Eleanor.
There it was.
That tiny spark of recognition.
Of satisfaction.
Eleanor set her fry down.
Lila said something low to the guy behind her and moved toward the bar with practiced ease, as if she belonged anywhere attention was already gathering.
“She sees you,” April murmured.
“I see her.”
At the bar, Reid had gone still, too. Luke glanced past him, clocked Lila, then looked back toward Eleanor and April with a sharper, more assessing expression.
“Let me guess,” April said. “Small-town coincidence.”
Eleanor didn’t answer.
Lila ordered a drink, laughing lightly at something the bartender said. She did not look over again.
Which was somehow worse.
April leaned in.
“We can leave.”
Eleanor shook her head once.
“No.”
“You sure?”
“No,” Eleanor said. “But I’m tired of leaving rooms first.”
April’s expression softened just a fraction.
The bartender set Lila’s drink down.
Lila had just stepped away from the bar when she passed Eleanor’s table.
She slowed, just enough to let Eleanor know it was deliberate.
“Oh,” she said lightly, glancing toward the far side of the room where Reid sat with Luke. “You and your boyfriend break up?”
Her mouth curved.
“How sad for you. Guess this town’s running out of district attorneys.”
Eleanor was on her feet before she even realized she had moved.
“So is it Lila Allen or Grant these days?” she said. “Or is Grant just the stage name?”
Lila went still.
Completely still.
For one second, the room disappeared.
Then, slowly, something almost like satisfaction crossed her face.
“Good,” she said quietly. “I’m glad you finally know.”
Eleanor stared at her.
“Yes,” Lila said. “It was always me.”
April was already pushing back from the table.
“Eleanor—”
But Eleanor couldn’t stop.
“You spent years following me. Ruining things. Punishing me for something I didn’t do.”
“My cousin died,” Lila snapped. The words cracked like a whip through the room. “And her filthy, lying husband killed her.”
Half the bar had gone silent now.
“You stood in front of a jury and made him look harmless,” Lila said. “You made people believe him. And he walked away. So yes. I wanted you to pay.”
Eleanor felt every eye in the room turn toward them.
“You got to come up here and start over. New town. New life. New man.” Her eyes flicked toward Reid. “What did we get?”
Her mouth twisted.
“Nothing. Not even a body to bury.”
Eleanor looked at Lila and saw it then—not just anger. Not just grief. Something uglier.
“I didn’t kill your cousin,” Eleanor said. “And I didn’t lie. I did my job.”
“No,” Lila said softly. “You saved the man who took everything from us.”
“Okay!” April cut in brightly, standing between them. “And that is enough true crime for one evening.”
April grabbed Eleanor’s arm.
She didn’t wait for a response. She pulled her through the crowd, fast enough that Eleanor had to keep up or fall. As Eleanor followed April, she caught the reflection of the camera lens tracking her—already recording.
The bell over the door jangled—sharp and jarring—as it swung shut behind them.
Across the room, Reid stood as if he’d been carved from courthouse granite. His gaze stayed fixed on the door long after it closed.
Luke Hale’s hand tightened on his arm, more arrest than comfort.
“Don’t,” Luke said, low. “The half-life of that video is already ten minutes. If you go after her, you’re handing Lila the shovel to bury you.”
Reid’s chest rose and fell in a shallow, jagged rhythm. The space where Eleanor had stood felt hollow, the smell of her perfume already swallowed by beer and grease.
“She’s alone out there,” he said.
“She’s got April. And she’s got a defense to run,” Luke replied, stepping into his line of sight. “You’re the district attorney. Act like it.”
He turned Reid toward the back exit, the one away from the cameras and the street.
“We’re leaving,” Luke said, his voice back to deputy sheriff.
Reid didn’t fight him. He walked out behind Luke, shoulders square, eyes forward. He didn’t look at the half-eaten basket of fries. He didn’t look at the empty chair where she’d sat.
Outside, the cool mountain air hit his face. He climbed into the passenger seat of Luke’s truck, a man who had just protected his career by abandoning his heart.
As they pulled away, the neon bar sign slid across the windshield like a closing curtain.
“You did the right thing,” Luke said.
Reid looked down at his hands in the dashboard light and wondered how the right thing could feel so much like a crime.