Chapter 38
Jacob
Three Months Ago
The job does something to you after enough years.
It’s not the evil things human beings are capable of doing, not the hours, not the paperwork that reproduces itself overnight like something alive and resentful.
It’s the smaller thing underneath it all.
The way you stop expecting anything good to be waiting for you on the other side of a door.
A closed door is just a closed door. You open it, you go in, you deal with whatever the room has decided to be tonight.
As I turn my key and enter my house, the room tonight has decided, after seven years, to put me face to face with her again.
“Hey, RJ.” She smiles. “I hope you don’t mind. I used the spare key.”
I stop in the doorway. She’s sitting on my couch with her knees pulled up and her shoes off and her hair—jet black—down, and for a moment that is long enough to embarrass me, I just stand there with my keys in my hand and the door open behind me and seven years of carefully maintained distance dissolving in the space between us like it has never been there at all.
Reagan Fletcher.
Birdie Abel.
She looks up at me with those eyes that have always made me question everything I’ve ever believed, even my very existence. “I wasn’t sure if you still lived alone. I checked the driveway first. No cars.”
I close the door. Then I set my keys on the hook the way I do every night because some part of me needs to be mechanical right now, needs something to do with my hands that isn’t reaching toward her. I take off my jacket. I hang it up. I turn around.
She looks terrible. She looks like the most beautiful thing I’ve seen in years.
Both of these things are equally and inconveniently true.
I’ve been managing the inconvenience of Reagan Fletcher since the first time Blake brought her to the precinct, not as a victim but as his girlfriend, and I shook her hand and smiled.
Then I went home, sat in this exact living room and had a very honest conversation with myself about the things I was going to have to get very good at not feeling.
“Before you ran away with Blake, I showed you where I kept that spare key for a reason. I hoped you’d never have to use it.
” That is a lie. I’ve been checking that key-hider rock every day, praying Blake fucks up and she sees his true colors, wishing for this exact moment.
I’ve fantasized about the things I’d do when she was finally alone with me, practiced the things I’d say, and yet here I am, tongue-tied, struggling to keep my heartbeat even. “Are you okay?”
What kind of stupid question is that? She wouldn’t be here if she was.
She simply shakes her head.
I sit in the chair across from her because the couch is not an option. Not with whatever emotions her blue eyes, her face, her presence, are stirring in me. Emotions I couldn’t fathom back then or have a name for now because I’m a fucking pussy. “Tell me everything.”
She does. She tells me about the control, the isolation, the abuse, the divorce he won’t give her because of her money, the violence after and before.
She tells me about the strings he pulls every time she reaches out for the police to help.
She’s been talking for about ten minutes, and with every second, fury burns under my skin until it simmers my blood.
“I made a mistake, RJ.” She unfolds herself from the couch. “I walked into the same trap like a fool.”
“It’s not your fault, Reagan.”
“Yes, it is. I should have known. What did I expect from a man like him? After what he did? I knew he had no morals, and I still married him.” She leans forward, her face catches the light, and I can see the shadows under her eyes.
“I married him because I was scared, and he was the only one there for me.”
He was there for her, and I wasn’t.
“I’m here now,” I whisper. “You’re welcome to stay here as long as you want, and I’ll deal with Blake myself. Do you want help with the divorce? I know good lawyers who can—”
“What I need is for you to transfer to Martha’s Vineyard.”
My brows hook. “What?”
“I think…” Her fingers rub over her lips. She shifts on the couch, and her gaze changes in a way that sets my entire nervous system on high alert. “I think Blake is going to kill me.”
My pulse spikes as my mind processes the accusation. Blake was my partner. I know his temper, the way he bends rules until they snap, but I also know fear can twist truth. Just like money. Just like secrets.
“You don’t believe me,” she mutters.
“I want to believe you, but when he texts me the same thing about you a day before you show up…”
“Blake texted you that I’d kill him?”
“We haven’t spoken in years, since the Abalo case. Last year, he called me out of the blue, wasted, and said…stupid things I dismissed and hung up on him. Then, yesterday, he called me again. I let it go to voicemail. But then he texted me this.” I show her my phone.
Please return my call. I need your help. The crazy bitch I married is plotting my perfect murder.
Her face remains calm, rather cold, and she just gives me the phone back. “Did you call him?”
“I did. I thought it was a sick joke of sorts or a way to get me to talk to him again that would maybe lead to an apology, but he meant every word. He said things like—”
“Like I’m the one who put him up to framing Mason for the Abalo case, and how guilty he feels about it he started seeing a therapist. Like Mason didn’t even hit me that night, and I staged the whole thing, and now I’m doing it all over to Blake.”
“Exactly. It sounds word for word.”
“Characters like Blake are very predictable.”
“Blake is a real man. He’s your husband, he thinks you’re a threat, and you think the same of him. This is not one of your stories, Birdie. This is a fucked-up situation that won’t end well for either of you.”
“Everything is a story, RJ. Anyone can write their own. People believe the version they want to believe. But the truth… That’s a different story.”
“I believe in evidence.” I have seen proof with my own eyes. I’m about to tell her about my trip to Vineyard Haven, thinking about how to say it without sounding like a creep.
She speaks faster than my thoughts. “Blake is doing drugs.”
“Drugs?”
“Ever since he was forced to retire. With his temper, it caused…more severe violent episodes.” She tucks her hair behind her ear, looking up with a sigh, blinking.
“When his apologies and gifts fell flat, and I no longer had the patience, or rather the weakness, that made me stay in this marriage, I demanded a divorce. He said he’d quit, and he’d go to therapy.
Silly me agreed, not knowing that it’d make things even worse. ”
“How?”
“He didn’t go to therapy for anger issues and addiction.
You know how charming and convincing Blake could be.
He didn’t have a problem lying to a young therapist about the crazy bitch he married, how depressed he was, and she believed the fuck out of him.
He even tricked her into giving him more drugs.
Can you believe that? Psychedelic amphetamines.
” She opens her purse and pulls out what looks like a business card and hands it to me. “Here’s her number. You can check.”
I read the therapist’s data on the card. “Aren’t they supposed to be trained to spot liars and drug seekers?”
“Well, she didn’t. She is young and inexperienced. He chose her on purpose. Blake sure knows how to spot them, the fragile, the prey.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“I think it was part of his plan to get rid of me, the testimony of his therapist against me, but it backfired because, eventually, she realized her mistake. Then she cut him off. That was how I found out about this whole fiasco and told him I was done. He needed to leave and give me a divorce…so he beat the shit out of me.” She pulls out her phone from her pocket, scrolls and holds it up for me to see.
“I have photographs of the X-rays and the initial report he buried to make it look like I fell down the stairs. I have the name of the radiologist who kept a private copy because she’s been a fan of my work for years and she was worried about me. ”
My jaw tightens as I look at the images. That son of a bitch. How could he do that to her after what she’d been through?
She scrolls some more before she shows me more photos.
“And he’s sleeping with Gia. My assistant and best friend.
In my own house, two days after he left me for dead.
I was upstairs, nursing my wounds, and he was fucking her downstairs.
She took those photos. I wouldn’t have found out if she hadn’t backed them up on the wrong cloud, the one I have access to, by accident. Or maybe she wanted me to know.”
I look at the images for as long as they deserve and pinch the bridge of my nose. “Reagan, I don’t know what to say.”
“Me neither. I still can’t wrap my head around it. My husband, for whom I’ve sacrificed everything, wants to kill me to take all my money and be with his mistress.”
“I still don’t understand. Why won’t he just give you a divorce? Is there a prenup?”
“No, but the money he’s made off me as my manager is gone on his drugs. Everything else is in my name. The house, the IP. I also hired a divorce attorney, and with what I have on him, he won’t get a dime.”
“The infidelity photos won’t go so far.”
“I know. But I have this.” She shows me a video of Blake pulling his gun on another man. “That’s how I kicked him out of the house, how I managed to come here, and that’s why he called you now, RJ. Every crime has a motive. There is your motive and evidence.”
I rock my leg, my head shaking. “Blake is a lot of things, Reagan, but a killer…”
She stares at me for a second, and then she smiles in defeat. She collects her things and stands. “I get it. He’s your friend. I shouldn’t have put you in this situation. My apologies.” She walks fast toward the door. “Forget I was ever here.”
No. I let her slip away once, watched him make her his while I stood there pretending it was the right thing. Not again.
“Reagan.” My voice comes out rough, too loud in the silence. She doesn’t stop. I move before I think, cutting across the room, blocking the door. My hand finds the frame—the way I’d corner a suspect. But she’s not a suspect. She’s the one person I can’t lose.
Her eyes flick up, wary. I see the alarm, the anger, the exhaustion, the walls she’s built to survive. And I hate that I’ve helped build them. “Don’t,” I say, softer now, closing the door. “Don’t go. Not this time.”
“I’m used to the police not believing me, but I thought you… I don’t know what I was thinking. You’re his partner.”
“I believe you, Reagan, and he’s not my partner anymore.
Blake screwed me bad. After IA found out about the false evidence, they were down my neck, too.
They questioned everything, every case he was involved in, and that meant me, too.
He never backed me up. He threw me under the bus and retired.
You have no idea how hard it was for me to clear my name.
How much time I’d lost that got in the way of moving forward with my career.
I will never take his side, but murder is a big deal, Reagan. ”
“Well, ask yourself one question, RJ. Why did Mason Bloom not survive long enough to appeal his conviction for Abalo’s murder?”
Blake got Bloom killed in prison? “No.”
“Yes.” She stares at me. “You still think he’s not capable of murder?”
“I’m sorry, Reagan. I was a coward before.
I won’t be again.” My eyes drop to her lips.
The detective in me is gone. There is only the man who’s been dying to touch her, to make her believe him.
I cup her face, thumb brushing the edge of her jaw.
Then I crush my lips onto hers in a silent confession of everything I’ve never allowed myself to say, not even in my own heart. “Please stay.”