I thought of my other child, the one I had no choice but to give up. She didn’t know about me, and David and I wanted to keep it that way. Her life that had nothing to do with any of this. They wanted to drag her into it. They wanted to test her blood and stamp her with a dead man’s name and rewrite her entire existence to build a case against me. I couldn’t let that happen.
“She’s his,” I said quietly. “The child is his. I gave her up for adoption when she was born. She lives with a family in Silver Spring and she’s happy and she doesn’t know I exist. I don’t want her dragged into this. I don’t want her knowing who I am, or who he was, or what happened. She deserves to stay exactly where she is.”
Xander was quiet for a moment. Not judging. Processing. I could see him recalculating the case with this new information, running legal scenarios behind those brown eyes. “We can fight the DNA request. There are privacy protections for adopted minors that make compelled testing difficult. It’s not impossible for them to get it, but I can make it hard enough that it buys us time. The bigger issue is where the tip came from.”
“It came from my mother.”
He blinked. “Vivica?”
“She’s dead, but she set this up before she died. She was the only person besides my father who knew about the pregnancy and the adoption. She’s the only one who would have had enough details to lead the police to that body.” I paused because what I was about to say next was going to change how Xander saw this case entirely. “She’s also the one who helped me bury him.”
Xander’s pen stopped moving. He looked up at me and his lawyer face cracked for just a second, just long enough for me to see the man underneath it. The Xander who used to bring sweet potato pie to Rita’s house on Thanksgiving and play spades with my brothers until two in the morning. The Xander who once told me I looked fine at Justice’s birthday party and then immediately changed the subject like the compliment had escaped against his will.
“You need to talk to my father,” I said. “Dante Oldsman. He was there that night. He helped. He knows what happened and he knows what Vivica did. If anybody can corroborate the truth, it’s him.”
I hesitated before saying the rest because sending Xander to Dante was a gamble. Dante wasn’t family anymore. He was Vivica’s ex-husband who’d been working with Mega before Mega caught two bullets from my own gun. Dante was complicated. But he was also the only person alive who knew what happened in that cabin.
“I’ll find him,” Xander said. “I’ll talk to him.”
He wrote something on his legal pad and then set the pen down again and I knew what was coming because the air in the room changed. His posture shifted. His eyes got softer but more direct at the same time and I recognized that look because I’d seen it on Justice’s face a hundred times. It was the look someone gives you when they need the truth and they’re giving you the courtesy of asking instead of assuming.
“Serenity. Did you kill David Jamison?”Was it you, or was it Vivica?That’s what he meant.The room got very quiet. I could hear the fluorescent light buzzing above us, the guard shifting his weight outside the door, my own heartbeat pulsing in my ears. I looked down at my hands on my belly. At the baby who was growing inside me and who would one day ask me questionsabout my past and I would have to decide how much truth she could carry.
I didn’t answer.
Xander watched me not answer and something settled in his face. An understanding. A decision. He picked his pen back up and said, “You have a bail hearing on Monday. No priors, no flight risk, and the evidence is thin. You should be able to come home on bail while we build the defense. I’m going to make that happen.”
“I cannot have this baby in this place, Xander. I need to be home.”
“You won’t. I promise you that. On Monday morning, I’m getting you out of here.”
He started packing up his briefcase and I watched his hands. Long fingers, clean nails, no ring. I caught myself and looked away because this was not the time. This was absolutely, categorically, not the time to be noticing Xander Wall’s hands while sitting in a county jumpsuit charged with murder.
He stood up and buttoned his jacket and looked at me one more time. “Try to rest. And don’t talk to anybody about your case. Not the guards, not the other women, nobody. Everything goes through me from now on.”
“I know the drill. I’m a Banks.”
He almost smiled at that. Almost. “Yeah. You are.”
He knocked on the door and the guard let him out. I sat there alone in the visitation room with my hands on my belly, the ghost of his cologne still hanging in the air. When I was nineteen I used to daydream about Xander Wall asking me out. Taking me somewhere nice. Looking at me across a table with candlelight between us instead of a metal surface bolted to the floor.
Funny how life works. The man I’d been wanting to notice me for years finally showed up, and it took a murder charge to make it happen.
I stood up slowly. The guard walked me back to my cell. I sat down on that terrible cot, stared at the ceiling, and tried to rest like Xander told me to. But my mind wouldn’t stop running. Because if Vivica planted the anonymous tip about my daughter, what else did she plant? What other secrets did she leave behind like landmines waiting for the wrong foot to step on them? She’d spent her whole life collecting leverage on everyone she loved. I was just the first detonation. There could be more coming. For Quest. For Justice. For Prime. For Rita.
My mother was dead and buried and she was still the most dangerous person in this family.
9
Mehar
Every morning we walked the shoreline. And every morning the ocean gave us the same answer.
Nothing.
No boats. No planes. No helicopters. No contrails in the sky, no engine sounding in the distance, no flicker of light on the horizon that could be anything other than the sun doing what the sun does. Just water, stretching out flat and blue and endless in every direction, indifferent to the two people standing on the beach begging it to deliver them something other than waves.
I was starting to hate the ocean. Which was wild because two weeks ago I was excited about spending time near it on a babymoon with my fiancé. Now it was a prison wall made of water and every morning I walked its perimeter looking for a crack in it and every morning it told me there wasn’t one.
