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As if Aunt Ruthie had told Lia to call me, my phone dinged with a text from her. “Hey, just wanted to let you know that I had my ultrasound today. Everything looks good, and I’m having twins. So excited.”
The lack of exclamation marks told me things still weren’t right between us. But twins. Wow! When we were ready, bonding over twins would be an easy way to put aside our differences.
And yet, I couldn’t put aside our differences until I uncovered the truth about my father. Had he killed my mother, or was he actually innocent?
Until I found out, I’d have to keep my thoughts to myself. Happy for Lia, I sent a congratulatory text filled with lots of exclamation marks.
* * *
Saturday morning,Troy and I found ourselves miraculously home alone. For once, the carpooling schedule worked as it was supposed to, and we neither had to take nor pick up the boys from soccer practice.
Deciding to take advantage of the time, we tackled the garage cleanup, a task that had been on our to-do list for the past five years.
Troy began by picking up the dollhouse I’d had for as long as I could remember. “What about this? Can we donate it?”
“Absolutely not.”
He lifted his brow. “Does that mean you want to try for a girl?”
I rolled my eyes. Troy desperately wanted more children, but I felt our lives were full enough with the twins and both of us working.
“The dollhouse stays, but what about these?” I held up the box containing all the tennis trophies Troy had earned in middle school.
Deeply wounded, my husband pressed a hand to his heart. “You want to throw away my tennis trophies?”
“They’re from middle school. We’ve been lugging this box around since we got married. Do you really need to keep all of them?”
The frown lines on his brow deepened as they always did whenever he was thinking. I loved Troy’s frown lines and had been horrified when one of his law school buddies suggested using cosmetic injection to erase those lines. Why would he want to lose something I found so endearing?
Today, however, I didn’t have time to admire Troy’s signs of aging. We were on a time crunch before the boys returned and distracted us from the thankless task of decluttering.
“Do you really think you’re going to display these trophies again?” I asked. “You’d have to spend at least an hour dusting them, then you’d have to build a shelf, and—”
“Okay, okay.” Chuckling, he held up both hands to stop my rant. “Point taken. I get it. You can toss them or donate them or do whatever it is you’re supposed to do with old trophies. I’m not as attached to them as you seem to be to your dollhouse.”
Ignoring his comment about my dollhouse, I added the box to the donation pile. Then, second-guessing myself, I pulled out the two biggest trophies. “Maybe we should save these for the boys. We can wrap them up for Christmas as a special gift.”
Troy’s face broke into a huge grin. “You’re as bad as me when it comes to getting rid of things. At this rate, we’ll never have a clean garage.”
I laughed even as a sense of sadness washed over me. Lately, I’d been thinking a lot about my own parents, wishing I knew more about them or at least had something that once belonged to them. What happened to all their belongings? Did Dottie still have them at the house, boxed up in the garage?
“What is it?” Troy asked.
I took a deep breath, then I told him everything—meeting Dottie, seeing the DNA in her refrigerator, spending hours reading about the case, and learning about the Innocence Project, an organization that used DNA evidence to reverse wrongful convictions. I also showed him the pictures I’d taken of Dottie’s murder board.
When I finished, Troy frowned. “This Dottie sounds a little nutty, right?”
I shrugged. “She’s different, but that doesn’t change the fact that she might be right. According to her, the only real evidence they had against Eddie was Aunt Ruthie’s eyewitness testimony.”
“Juries love eyewitness testimony,” Troy said.
“That’s true, but it’s not always accurate, right?”
He paused. “It can be inaccurate when it comes to strangers. But your mom knew Eddie. He was her brother-in-law.”
I shook my head, my adrenaline racing. “That’s the thing. She didn’t know him. She’d never even seen him in person before.”
“Really?”
