31. Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-One
Trent
T homas calls to tell me the police need to speak to me again about something they discovered.
He tells me he doesn’t believe it’s a big deal, but they have implicated Judy in Dan’s drug ring.
They didn’t find anything at the shop, but they got a warrant for her house, and they located enough to charge her too.
Even though it’s not, it feels like everything is collapsing on my head. Maybe I wasn’t dealing drugs, but apparently, I was employing a drug dealer. Tell me that’s not going to rub people in Little Falls the wrong way, and I’ll call you a liar. Guilty by association.
My mom has gone for a grocery run because she’s braver than me, and for better or worse, she’s faced this kind of fall out before. Except this time, I didn’t do anything wrong, and I’m not sure if that makes facing people’s scrutiny better or worse.
Worse, I think. To be falsely accused is worse.
Emily’s car pulls into my mom’s driveway, and I take a deep breath before heading to the front door. I’d hoped she’d understand and stay away, but she’s stubborn, so I should have known better.
“Em, you shouldn’t be here,” I say as she gets out of her car.
Emily doesn’t even answer me. She just comes up the front walkway, steps around me, and enters the house.
She’s got guts—I’ll give her that.
With a sigh, I turn and enter the house behind her.
We stand in the living room, a face-off, and if she thinks I’m going to be the first one to talk, she’ll be waiting a long time. I said everything I needed to say yesterday.
“I just wanted to make sure you’re not cutting Amir out too,” she says.
I hate that I can see, can recognize all the little tells in the way she speaks and moves that tell me how hard it is for her to be here. Having been behind the curtain of her life, I can’t pretend I don’t know how the show goes on.
“I’d still like to see him a bit,” I admit, “not as publicly, but I made a promise to you and him that I’d honor.”
“You made a promise to me too,” she says, and her voice cracks.
“I’m not doing this to hurt you.”
“But the hurt isn’t nothing. The choices you’ve made impact me. A lot.”
“I know that, which is why I’m putting some distance between us. You don’t deserve to be impacted by them.” I run my hand along the top of my head. “And I think we should sell the shop, before it loses too much value. I can’t recover from this.”
“Absolutely not,” Emily says, her spine straightening. “I’m not selling.”
“You’ll lose money. It’ll take years for me to build back the trust I just lost. Judy’s been arrested for dealing. She worked at my shop. People will think they just couldn’t get enough on me and Judy took the fall.”
“I’m not selling.”
“Then you should find someone better to run it.”
“There is no one better.”
“Brett could do it, if he wanted.”
“You’re not listening to me.”
“Funny, I was just thinking the same thing.”
We stare at each other, and the tears in her eyes almost undo me.
Fuck, I hate this. I hate how much it hurts, and how hard I’m trying to hide the hurt.
The ache to be close to her, to breach the gap between us, is a physical pain and so strong that it’s distracting.
But I won’t let my emotions win out. She doesn’t deserve any of this backlash, and I brought it right to her door.
“I’m just glad this all came out when it did,” I say. “That you haven’t ended up tied to me and my reputation permanently.”
“You promised me that no matter what happened between us, we’d still be friends.”
“When a friendship becomes more harmful than helpful, I gotta draw the line. There was no way for me to know this is where life would take us, but here we are.” My words might be matter of fact and confident, but inside I’m struggling to keep it together.
The last thirty-six hours have drastically changed the course of my life, and I can’t quite find stable emotional footing.
I want things I shouldn’t. Things I can’t have anymore.
“I understand how disorienting the last day and a half has been for you. You’ve worked really hard to regain people’s trust, to make the business run properly.
Seeing that at risk must be really difficult.
” Her voice is thick with tears. “But just like you didn’t abandon me when I was having a tough time, I’m not abandoning you now.
Maybe you think you don’t want me here, but I’m going to be here.
It’s taken me four years to feel like myself again, and this Emily,” she says, pointing to her chest, “is a fighter , not a quitter.”
God, I fucking love her. My whole chest is filled with it, and it’s pushing out into the rest of me, begging me to go to her, tug her into my embrace, tell her I don’t care about anything but her and Amir.
That’s the irresponsible version of me struggling to break free. Damn the consequences, I’ll take what I want. And I’m not that guy anymore.
Maybe it hurts right now, but someday it won’t. I won’t have to hear people talking shit about Emily because she’s with me. They’ll know she cut ties with me, and they’ll go back to seeing Emily as she is—untainted by me.
“I’m not even in the fight, Em. I’ve tapped out.”
“Lucky for you,” Emily says, hitching her purse onto her shoulder, “I’ve got enough fight in me for both of us.”
Before I can tell her it’s futile, that I’ll never let her get that close again for fear of the impact it’d have on her life, she’s out the door and halfway to her car. I watch her go, my heart sinking at how much I want her and how sure I am that I can’t have her.
If there’s one place I never want to go again in my life, it’s here, the police station. Everything about it sends chills down my spine, and now, knowing they’ve pinned something on Judy and have questions about my business, I have no idea what exactly I’m walking into.
“We should talk,” Thomas says, greeting me when I walk in the door. We duck into an empty room reserved for lawyers and their clients, and he shuts the door behind him.
I don’t sit down, preferring to stand, and Thomas leans against the wall too.
“What do they think they have?” I ask.
“You installed security cameras in your office and around the shop, correct?”
“Yeah, after the break-in.”
“That probably saved you from Judy dealing there. One of the people associated with Dan admitted he broke into the shop. The purpose of the break-in is a bit hazy, but I don’t think they anticipated you responding with so many cameras.” He lets out a little chuckle.
None of this is funny to me.
“So, great—the cameras saved me. Why am I here?”
“There are several hours, and sometimes whole days, that are deleted from the security footage archive. A few times where it appears you turned off the cameras in your office. They can’t pin anything on you, but they want those holes filled in.
Judy hasn’t implicated you, but Dan keeps trying to say you were part of it.
Judy hasn’t really said definitively either way. ”
The deleted footage. My stomach drops when I realize what footage I deleted. Fuck . I even called the company and made sure any cached files were also deleted. There was no way I was leaving Emily exposed.
“They need me to confirm why I did that?” I ask. As long as it’s what and not who, I can take the heat for that.
“A logical explanation, yes.”
“I have one,” I say.
“Do you want to tell me now? Will it create more complications?”
“I doubt it,” I say.
“Alright,” Thomas says. “Let’s go explain it to them so we can get all this cleared up.”
In the small room next door, we sit and wait until two officers enter. They sit across from us, and then they slide a piece of paper to me. On the paper are dates and times when the security in the office was turned off or deleted.
“We’re hesitant to believe you’re involved in all this, Trent, but this missing information is a giant question mark. You could have been doing anything in the office.”
I want to ask whether they traced who entered my shop on those days and nights, but I really want to leave Emily out of this—any of this. Besides, that doesn’t account for the times I deleted whole days instead of just isolating the timeframe she was in the office. My laziness has consequences.
“I had a woman in the office, and we were doing things I would rather not have recorded.”
The two officers exchange glances and the older one says, “We’ll need the name of the woman or women to confirm dates and timeframes.”
“Why would you delete a whole day?” the other officer asks.
“Laziness. To delete a specific section, you have to watch it back, isolate the timeframe, and then delete that specific section. Then you have to go into the deleted files and delete it there.”
“But you also called the company and had them delete any version saved on their backend.”
“Right. Privacy is an illusion when it comes to a digital footprint, right? I did the best I could to make sure the woman I was with wouldn’t suffer any embarrassing consequences.”
“We’ll just verify this with her,” the older man says again. “Name and contact?”
“I’m not giving that out,” I say.
Thomas glares at me from the side. I can feel it penetrating my head.
“You understand that we can’t close this until we verify that the missing footage isn’t somehow connected to the drug ring—some elements of which Dan Ramouli is trying very hard to pin on you.”
I’m almost afraid to ask, given Judy’s involvement, but I do anyway. “Did you find anything—even one scrap of evidence—that links me to what Dan and Judy were doing?”
Neither of them answers, and it feels a lot like their refusal to close the claim has more to do with preconceived notions about me—the ex-con—than a real need to verify who I was having sex with in the office.
“Now, if you’re not arresting me, I think we’re done here.” I rise, and when they don’t stop me, I walk out the door.
Thomas follows fast on my heels. “Trent!”
But I don’t stop until I’m out the door of the station and it feels like my lungs can take in a full breath again.
“Trent!” he calls again, and I stop near my truck. “Look,” he says, out of breath, “whoever is on the deleted footage—their name won’t go beyond the station.”
“Bullshit,” I say. “The small-town gossip network is sneaky and persistent. Someone will hear something, and it’ll spin out. There are no secrets, so I’m keeping this one close to my chest.” Locked in my fucking heart.
“They won’t close this line of questioning—your shop will stay closed—until they can be sure you’re not involved.”
“They are sure,” I say. “They’re prejudiced against me because of what I did last time. And I never lied about it then. I got caught, and I put up my hands and said I did it.”
“The loophole—”
“I’m not dragging her into this mess. Next time you talk to them, tell them they just need to be satisfied with the truth I gave them.”
“Your stubbornness is going to cause your life to be fucked up longer than it needs to be,” Thomas says with a frustrated sigh. “And maybe you’re okay with that, but I’m not.”
In the last two days, my whole life has been turned upside down, and I’m just doing my best to protect the people who matter to me. I don’t care what happens to me, but I care a lot about what happens to them.