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Imani smiled. “I have a lot of experience. You’ll get there.”
“Let’s hope so. In the meantime, I’d be screwed without you.”
Imani laughed. “Any movement on the Murphy case?”
Alexa’s blood seemed to freeze in her veins, and she wondered if it was her imagination that her face felt flushed. “I haven’t gotten any new information.”
It was the truth but it felt like a lie, the kind of lie Nick had told when he’d left out the part about digging into her past.
Imani nodded. “I can give you another three months, maybe, before we’ll have to close the file. If you think there’s something there, I might be able to give you some budget for an investigator. No guarantees, but I’ll see what I can do.”
“Let me review what I have and get back to you,” Alexa said.
Imani nodded and pushed off the door frame. “Congratulations again. You’ve done a great job with Orion.”
She disappeared into the hall and Alexa stared at the space where she’d been standing, Imani’s words echoing in her mind.
If you think there’s something there, I might be able to give you some budget for an investigator.
The collision of her job and her affair with Nick had been inevitable, but somehow it was still a shock to see them meet, to realize she still had decisions to make about the potential case against Nick and his brothers.
She leaned back in her chair with a sigh. It had been five days since her fight with Nick. Five days since he’d occupied her body, since he’d made her believe she could trust him, since he’d proven her wrong.
She could still see his face on that last awful night, the pain in his eyes, the resignation in the set of his jaw. She’d expected him to fight, maybe even to beg. Instead he’d left with a kind of resignation that said he understood the mistake he’d made, that he knew it was too big a mistake for her to ever forgive.
There had been times in the days since, times when she had been staring off into space at work or sitting in traffic, when she’d felt like a hypocrite. He’d been right about one thing: she’d done background on him first. She knew everything about his family, even the details of his sister’s overdose, something she’d never mentioned to him even though she assumed he knew it had come up in the AG’s background.
But that had been established at the beginning of their relationship. She hadn’t hidden her intent, hadn’t made any secret about the fact that she’d done extensive research on him, his family, and his business.
He, on the other hand, had pretended not to know anything about her, had asked questions as if he were just a regular guy trying to get to know her. The difference between the two scenarios seemed thin when she laid it out, but it was impossible to quantify the importance of her accident in the grand scheme of her life. It had been her single biggest defining moment. Knowing Nick had read about her, had probably watched old media footage of her after the accident when she’d been battered and on display, made her feel exposed and vulnerable.
It didn’t make sense when she tried to apply logic to the problem. She’d already been on display, hadn’t she? What did it matter if Nick saw the footage when everyone else had already seen it? She’d been all over the news, had been too shell-shocked after the accident to wonder if she’d want the footage of her at her most broken floating around to haunt her ten or twenty or thirty years later.
She didn’t have the answers, couldn’t explain why she felt so betrayed, so violated. She only knew that she did. That the omission felt unforgivable.
And it wasn’t just the personal aspect of their conversation that haunted her. She’d replayed it a million times in the five days since he’d walked out her door, and while the lie hurt the most, she couldn’t ignore the other things he’d told her, the text she’d seen on his phone.
If Nick was telling the truth — and she had no reason to think that he wasn’t now that everything was out in the open — there were serious inconsistencies in her case. He was right: Allston was a busy highway during the day, and there was still plenty of traffic on the street at all hours. It was lined with businesses, and even back then there had been enough CCTV in the city that some camera somewhere should have turned up footage of the accident, or at the very least another ruined car leaving the scene.
Her chest tightened and her stomach flipped. Of all the unpleasant things she spent time thinking about — and there were plenty given her job — her accident was still at the top of the list. She’d spent twelve years dealing with the trauma, learning to breathe through panic attacks, meditating to center her mind, rebuilding her body.
And it all came back in an instant.
She’d been too traumatized immediately following the accident to think too hard about her case. At first her parents had been obsessed with finding out who’d hit Alexa and Samantha, who’d left them to die, but after a while Alexa had made them stop talking about it. She needed to focus on her recovery, on her future, and she couldn’t do that if they kept talking about the past.
She couldn’t remember the moment she’d decided to accept that whoever had done this to Samantha — to her — wouldn’t be brought to justice. Somewhere along the way, she’d just stopped thinking about the accident and had started thinking about how to survive it. She’d met with Samantha’s parents only once after she got home from the hospital. The meeting had been emotional for all concerned, and they’d never seen each other again.
As for the two detectives, there could be a logical reason for the promotion of Detective Delaney and the retirement of Detective Maynard after the accident, but there was only one way to find out.
She hesitated, reached for her phone, and pressed three on the AG’s speed dial system.
“Boston PD.” The voice was gruff and male.
“This is Alexa Nash at the AG’s office. I’d like to speak to Detective Kelly.”
19
Nick looked around the cluttered room, hunting for a place to sit. “Jesus, how do you work in this mess?”
