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Okay, so maybe he was hoping for something, thinking Isabelle might have softened toward him a little. There’d been a lot of changes in the past three months, after all.
In February, with all the new activity on the case, the FBI had finally requested DNA samples of a John Doe who’d died about five years before. The man had been living in Central America with a fake passport. The DNA tests proved that he’d been Malcolm Pozniak.
His remains had been long since buried in Ecuador, but the US Embassy had still had his personal possessions in a box in storage. Tom had fought hard to have everything sent to him once it was processed.
He’d also fought hard to get the charges that had been pending against Isabelle dropped. He wasn’t sure how much of a difference he’d made. After all, sh
e’d had an attorney. But all but two misdemeanors had been tossed out. She wouldn’t be serving any time. She didn’t deserve to.
So maybe, after all those changes and with the danger having released its hold on her life, maybe she’d changed her mind about him a little.
Or maybe she’d been so busy and stressed, she hadn’t been thinking about him at all. Or maybe she hated his guts.
However it was, he couldn’t leave it the way they’d said goodbye. He needed to say goodbye when she wasn’t crying and so damn angry and... He still couldn’t believe he’d touched her like that. He’d thought she’d needed it the way he had. As a moment of grace. Of connection. Of knowing they’d make things better. But that hadn’t been it at all.
“Damn,” he muttered as he pulled onto the highway out of town. Damn, indeed. It was going to be a very long drive, but he didn’t have much doubt that the drive home would be even longer. It was one thing to drive toward hope, and a very different thing to know you were driving away from it.
* * *
LAUREN STOOD UP from the corner table she’d managed to snag at their favorite restaurant. “Congratulations!” she said, holding up a glass of champagne as Isabelle approached. “You’re not a felon!”
“Oh, my God,” Isabelle groaned. “You’re the worst.”
“Are you kidding me? That’s a big deal!”
“Thanks.” She took the glass Lauren handed her and downed a big gulp.
Yesterday she’d signed a deal in her lawyer’s office that would allow her to plead down to two minor tax-fraud counts for using a fake name and social security number. All other charges, including the stickiest one of withholding evidence in a federal murder case, had been wiped away. She was a free woman, basically. And not just free, but legal. This morning a state judge had granted her a name change. She was no longer living a lie.
“Where’s Veronica?” Isabelle asked. This would be Veronica’s second girls’ night out with them. She was a little quiet, but Isabelle had been quiet with the other women at first, too. It wasn’t easy to trust people. She understood that.
“She’s running late. Something about a deadline for her column. She told us to start without her.”
Isabelle took another sip. “Did she think we wouldn’t?”
“She’s new. So how are you holding up? You look good. You stopped losing weight.”
“Yeah, I felt like eating again once they told me they probably wouldn’t even need my testimony. The gun has Kerrigan’s fingerprints on it, and ballistic tests confirmed it shot the first bullet. I won’t have to go back there and face those people.”
“Good. And everything else?”
“Everything else is good. I just started a new commission. It feels great to get back to work.”
“Mmm.” Lauren sipped her champagne and watched Isabelle over the rim of her glass.
“What?”
She shrugged. “I heard Jill saw Tom a couple of weeks ago.”
Isabelle felt her face go hot for a brief moment before it went ice-cold. She shook her head. Her ears buzzed. “I don’t want to know about that.” She’d known Jill might have seen Tom when she met Mary for dinner, but Jill hadn’t said a thing about it.
“Isabelle,” Lauren said, “you still like him.”
“No, I don’t,” she said. “He lied to me about everything.”
“You lied about everything, too.”
“It’s not the same.”
