Another moment of silence.
“Damn it, Gwen. I’m not gonna tell anyone. But I think we’re kind of in this together now, aren’t we?”
“Kinda felt like I was in it alone when you were knocked out, and I was dragging you into the car, and then into the house, and then going back there to grab—” A sharp inhale cut me off. I shook my head and looked away.
“What—do you expect me to apologize for being unconscious? It’s not like I intentionally left you to fend for yourself, Gwen.”
“Plausible deniability,” I said. “I’m being careful with how much I say soyouhave plausible deniability, Simone. I know it’s not your fault.Noneof this is your fault. I’m not upset with you. I’m really damn happy that you’re alive, though.” My throat tightened. “All night long, I have been scrambling. I think I’m at about thirty hours without sleep now. My shift starts in an hour and a half, and I can’t miss it, because I need today to look like a normal day to everyone else. I haven’t had time to think of a plan for anything else.”
A long moment of silence stretched on. We stared at one another.
Eventually, tears gathered in her good eye again. “Plausible deniability?”
I nodded. “Plausible deniability.”
A few tears beaded over. She wiped them away and swallowed hard. “Okay. That’s good. I mean, it’s not good, but it is. That sounds horrible, but this is good.”
Now it was me with a lump in my throat and tears in my eyes. “Is it?”
“He would’ve exposed the ranch,” she said, wrapping her arms around her torso. Like giving herself a hug. “The loan I just got for the salon would be gone. I might be in jail right now for kidnapping. At least a couple hundred other women here would be too. He either would’ve won custody of Junie, or his batshit crazy mother would’ve, or she would’ve wound up in the system. Troy would be on his way here to pick Honey up, and we would all be at risk.”
The same thoughts I’d had all night. The same rationale.
So why did I still feel like I was going to vomit?
“David was from Wyoming.” Simone nodded, her gaze on the floor. “He’s not connected to this town. Those couple witnesses might’ve seen him yesterday, but they probably wouldn’t be able to identify him.” She paused. “You got rid of everything, right?”
“Plausible deniability, Simone.”
“I’ll take that as a yes,” she murmured, eyes scanning the ground. She hunched forward, rubbing her hands down her cheeks. “Okay. Okay, so I left Junie with Margaret last night. I told her that I was having a bad PTSD day and was coming up here to hang out with you. So we’re each other’s alibis, right?”
“Kind of evades the purpose of plausible deniability.”
She waved me off. “I walked down to the gate this morning. Whatever you did, you did well. It didn’t look like anything happened there.”
I rubbed a hand over my mouth, my other still buried in Honey’s fur. “Tried my best.”
“And because I opened the gate from inside, there shouldn’t be a log of it in the roster. You didn’t come back in through the gate this morning, did you? That’s why you came in through the back, right? Because you walked through the woods?”
I said nothing in response. Only nodded, my lips pressed tight together and eyes clenched shut.
“Alright, cut the shit, Gwen.”
Simone’s tone had me looking up, her own gaze snapped back to mine. She barely looked like herself. Her lips, eye, even cheeks were so swollen, so red and bruised, that the fire inside me ignited again. A glance at her reminded me that I’d done what I had to.
“I know you killed him,” she said, her eyes glittering. “Thank you. But if this ever comes back around, I’m not letting you go to prison for it. You saved my life, but this is my cross to bear.”
I was the one who killed him. If it came back around, she wasn’t the one who would go to prison for it. She had a little girl who needed looked after.
She leaned back and drained her coffee mug, then slammed it back on the coffee table. “So just answer the damn question. You didn’t use your key card to get back in, did you?”
I answered honestly. “No. I didn’t use my key card.”
“And there are no cameras up front,” she said, tucking a knee to her chest. “So there’s no proof that either of us were outside the gates last night.”
“After I got rid of the car, a cab driver brought me back,” I told her. “He shouldn’t be able to recognize me though. I changed clothes and wore a mask.”
Confusion pinched her swollen face. She grimaced at the pain it caused. “Where the hell did you find a cab?”
