I shake my head, forcing my voice to stay steady despite the pressure building in my chest. “We didn’t hear anything until the scream.”
“The scream?” His eyebrow lifts slightly, not quite disbelief, but close enough to feel like it. I can feel the weight of his attention moving over me, searching, measuring, waiting for something to slip.
“We were eating breakfast out back,” Bennett says evenly, stepping in beside me with that calm, grounded tone he always finds in moments like this. “We heard Chrissy scream and came around to the front.”
The officer glances from our house to Phillip’s, his gaze lingering on the distance between them as if calculatingsomething. “So no gunshot. Just the scream.” He pauses, then shifts his focus back to us. “Did you know your neighbors well?”
The question lodges somewhere in my throat, sharp and unwelcome. There are too many answers to it, none of them safe.
I think he killed my best friend.
I swallow it down.
“As well as you do after living next door to someone for ten years,” I say, keeping my tone neutral, careful.
He nods once, jotting something down in his notepad before sliding it neatly into his breast pocket. “We’ll need a formal statement. Since you were the ones who responded first.”
He directs that at Bennett, but his eyes keep returning to me, circling back like I’m the part of the equation that doesn’t quite fit. I feel it settle over me like heat, like a spotlight I can’t step out of. My chest tightens, and I have to focus on breathing evenly, on keeping my expression composed.
“One more thing,” he adds, almost casually. “How long has Ms. Chrissy been living with the victim?”
The victim.
The word lands strangely.
Phillip as a victim feels wrong, like something misaligned. But then again, a man lying dead in his own front yard, his skull shattered into the grass, fits the definition whether I like it or not.
“A few weeks,” Bennett answers.
The officer nods again, his gaze flicking briefly past me, scanning the yard, the house, the edges of the scene as if something might reveal itself if he looks long enough.
“Do you think she did this?” The question leaves me before I can stop it, sharp and immediate.
He turns back to me, one eyebrow lifting, a flicker of interest breaking through the neutrality. “Too soon to tell,” he says witha small shrug, his mouth tightening into something that almost resembles a smile. “We’ll be in touch.”
And then he’s gone, stepping off the porch and back into the controlled chaos unfolding across the lawn.
For a moment, neither Bennett nor I speak. The silence between us feels different now, thinner, stretched tight with everything we’re both thinking but not saying.
“This isn’t going to be good,” Bennett says finally, his voice low. “Two dead in a month. A mistress. A motorcycle club. It sounds like one of those books you read.”
“Truth is stranger than fiction,” I murmur, though the words feel hollow as they leave me.
Across the street, I catch movement. Tara, Caroline, and two of the other women are already gathering, their heads bent together, their voices low. I don’t have to hear them to know what they’re saying. I can almost feel the shape of it, the speculation, the quiet certainty forming before any real facts have surfaced.
It was the mistress.
It’s always the mistress.
What did you expect?
My chest tightens as something else settles in.
Whitney.
Her death is already slipping, already being overshadowed. A violent murder in the open will eclipse a yacht explosion, no matter how suspicious it was. The narrative is shifting in real time, redirecting itself toward something louder, bloodier, easier to consume.
Phillip, even in death, has taken center stage.
