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Nick’s face is a study in animal fury now. His lips are peeled back in a grimace, his nostrils flaring as he listens in barely restrained silence.
“I don’t know how long I lay there. He had gone back to the TV. I could hear it in the background as I got up and cleaned myself off with a tissue. I don’t remember getting dressed, but I walked out of my room sometime later in my clothes for school. But I didn’t leave for school. I went downstairs to the basement, to the gun cabinet he never bothered to lock. Then I came back up and put a bullet in his chest.”
Nick doesn’t say a word. He doesn’t so much as blink.
“I shot him,” I confess—at last, finally. “I shot him and then I sat across from him and watched him bleed. I don’t know why I didn’t shoot him again. Shock, I guess. I remember looking at him as he slumped out of his chair and onto the floor, wheezing and sputtering, trying to drag himself toward me. I moved across the room and I just . . . watched him. I waited for him to die, but he didn’t.”
“What happened with your mom?”
“She came home a while later. Martin was still alive, but barely.” I exhale, picturing the whole incident as if I were looking in from outside myself. “She didn’t scream. She didn’t cry. She didn’t ask me what happened. She knew. Just by looking at me . . . she knew what he’d done.”
Nick draws me against him, holding me close.
“She walked right past him on the blood-soaked floor to carefully take the gun out of my hands and set it aside. Then she wrapped me in her arms and told me to go take a shower. She told me she would clean up the mess and that I should go to my grandparents’ house down the street. She told me that she would take of everything.”
“The second gunshot wound,” Nick says. “The police reports and court evidence stated that it wasn’t the first bullet that killed him. It was the second one, fired sometime between one to two hours afterward.”
He’s obviously been reading up on the case, since these are details I haven’t yet shared with him. No doubt, he and his lawyer, Andrew Beckham, have been poring over all of the documents in my mother’s case in preparation of securing that new legal team Nick has mentioned.
“According to the file, you weren’t home that morning,” he points out. “Your mother told police that you were at your grandparents’ house all day, that you stayed home sick from school. Your grandmother corroborated the story.”
I nod, finding it strange to hear Nick recite the old lie that Mom and Gran had drilled into me for weeks after the killing. I feel lighter now that it’s out in the open.
But he isn’t the only one who knows the truth now.
“My mother lied to protect me. She told the police she and Martin argued and she shot him twice. She told the story as if she had been the one to watch him suffer during the time between the first shot and the fatal one. She killed for me, Nick. And for the past nine years, she’s been living in a cell in order to keep me out of one.”
Nick takes a step back from me now, scrubbing his hand over his jaw. “It was self-defense, Avery. For fuck’s sake, what you did—it was justified. Any reasonable judge would’ve agreed with that. Any competent lawyer would’ve made sure you never served a day behind bars.”
I can’t say his logic is weak, or that I haven’t thought the same things myself these past nine years. But at sixteen, I was just a terrified, traumatized girl. And it wasn’t as if my mother gave me the choice in any of this.
“She didn’t want to take that chance, Nick. She didn’t want me going to trial, even as a minor. She said she blamed herself for letting Martin get anywhere near me, and refused to let me speak up for her.” My heart aches to think of all my mother endured for me. And what she continues to endure. “If I could change places with her now, I would.”
“No.” His reply is adamant. “I won’t stand for that. Don’t even think it, Avery.” He studies me, frowning. “Is your mother the reason you needed that money?”
I shake my head. “No. Not the way you’re thinking.”
“Then what?”
“Someone knows what really happened, Nick. Martin Coyle’s son. My stepbrother, Rodney. He saw my car outside the house that day.”
I tell him about the phone calls and texts, about Rodney’s threat to expose my lie to Nick, and, eventually, to the press and anyone else he might be able to profit from.
I tell Nick how Rodney tracked me down from our photo that went viral on the Internet a few months ago, how he somehow arranged for my mother’s accident as a means of getting my attention and ensuring my cooperation with him. I tell him how Rodney’s harassment had recently escalated to an in-person confrontation here in the city.
“That son of a bitch is in Manhattan?” he growls. “When did you see him? Where was I, and how did he manage to get close to you?”
“It happened last week, at that Italian restaurant in East Harlem.”
Nick’s expression hardens. “We were together there.”
“Not when I went to ladies’ room.”
He considers for a moment, then a sharp curse explodes off his tongue. “The smug asshole who strutted past our table as we were leaving. He got near you, alone, and you didn’t tell me?”
“I couldn’t. Please understand, Nick. I was so scared. I still am.”
“Of your stepbrother? Give me five minutes with the fucker and there’ll be nothing left of him to be afraid of.”
