Maya
Innocent people took pleas every day. Innocent people made the practical decision all the time.
A confession in exchange for freedom. A lie in exchange for maybe keeping part of her life.
Her lawyer’s advice was to plead guilty.
Reid answered the call on the first ring. Like some part of him existed now in a permanent state of waiting for her.
The sound of his voice did something to her chest.
“Hi,” she said.
A pause. “Are you all right?”
She hated that he could hear it. One word and he could hear it.
“Yes.” She closed her eyes. “I mean, I’m fine. I just—Naomi Carter offered me a job.”
“That’s good,” he said. “Maya, that’s really good.”
She turned away from the counter and looked into the darkening glass of the back door. Her reflection stared back at her, pale and hollow-eyed, phone pressed to her ear.
She didn’t know she was going to say the words until they came out.
“I’m going to plead guilty,” she told him.
On the other end of the line, Reid inhaled.
“Don’t,” he said. “Please don’t. You won’t be convicted. I promise you. I’m fixing it. Trust me.”
She wanted to but she knew she shouldn’t.
“I trusted you before,” she whispered. “You arrested me.”
“I know.”
The words cost him, she could hear it in his voice.
Maya wiped her cheek with the heel of her hand. She hadn’t realized she was crying until then. “I’m scared,” she said.
“Maya.”
“I don’t want to go to prison.”
“You won’t.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I do.”
She closed her eyes. “How can you be so sure?”
“Because I won’t let that happen.”
As if he could stand between her and the entire state. As if he hadn’t once stood on the other side of it.
“You can’t say that,” she whispered.
“I can.”
She wanted to believe him.
The man who had closed cuffs around her wrists. The man whose signature had turned suspicion into charge, charge into case, case into this monstrous thing that followed her into every room.
She should scream at him. She should hang up. She should follow the legal advice from her lawyer.
Instead she stood in the kitchen, phone pressed to her ear, desperate for him to tell her what to do.
“Plead not guilty,” he said.
Maya opened her eyes.
“Okay,” she said.
Maya had walked this street a hundred times.
The first sounds of the picnic reached her before she saw it. Children shrieking over some game, a microphone squealing, then cutting out. Music, cheerful and loud, the metallic clank of people setting up folding tables.
Her stomach tightened.
Those sounds used to mean work and pleasure. Her grandmother’s cookies, cashboxes, Barbara setting up her blanket under the oak tree. Owen trying to figure out a way he could take a turn in the dunk tank. Reid testing half the bake sale inventory and overpaying.
The picnic had carried her fingerprints everywhere. She knew which families needed the accessible parking, she knew who could be trusted with the cashbox and who would wander off mid-shift.
She had been someone people gave their money to.
That was different this year.
Maya reached the edge of the park and stopped.
The field opened in front of her, bright and alive and cruel. Blankets spread over grass, children with painted faces, raffle tickets and hot dogs.
A community that still felt like home to her.
Maya folded her arms over her middle.
Then she saw the bake sale table.
Her breath caught.
And she saw Reid.
He stood behind it, tall and painfully out of place, arranging baked goods like a man defusing a bomb. There were cakes on the table. Layer cakes, cupcakes, lopsided squares of something pale with glaze running unevenly down the sides.
Heads began to turn, a man approached him, a woman.
Maya could not hear the words from where she stood, but she saw Reid straighten. Saw his shoulders square. Saw how the people left without buying anything.
He had put himself exactly where she used to stand. And was being rejected just as she would have been.