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“You’re sorry?” My tone seems to catch her off guard. It does me too. I lean over the table to get closer to my sister, lowering my voice so there’s no chance of anyone overhearing us. “Julie, it was self-defense. He beat you. He threatened you. You had a right to defend yourself.”
“I know,” she says, and her own tone drops a few decibels. “But I didn’t ask you to cover for me. I didn’t want any of this.” She stops and takes a deep breath; her whole body seems to rattle slightly.
“Fuck.” I slam my hand on the table, hard, and pain shoots up my arm. Julie looks alarmed. Across the room, Jaxon eyes me, ready to intervene if I lose my shit and throttle my sister, I assume.
“I’m sorry, Joe,” Julie says quietly.
I swallow and shake my head, then fold my hands and rest them on top of the table. “You have to tell the police,” I say. “You have to tell them that it was an accident, but it was self-defense. He wouldn’t let you leave the house or something.”
“It doesn’t matter. They already think you did it,” Julie says. She looks away from me again, then folds her arms across her chest and leans back, shaking her head. “At this point, they wouldn’t believe me even if I tried.”
“Jesus Christ, Jules.” I rub my face and squeeze my eyes shut. “I took the fall for you that night with Ray. I knew you had no prior convictions, and I wasn’t about to let you go down for it. But are seriously going to throw me under the bus for murder?”
“Don’t look at me like I want to do this.”
“You must.”
“I don’t.” Julie doesn’t look at me. Still. I don’t think she has the courage to. When I try to reach out to take her hand, she pulls away and looks at the wall instead of at me.
“Julia,” I say softly, lowering my voice. “I cannot get out of here without your help. Do you understand that? You need to speak to the police.”
“Who says they’ll believe me now?” my sister asks, shaking her head. “You fucked it all up, Joey. You covered for me when things were easy but now that Ray is dead, things are different.”
“But I didn’t kill him!” I slam one palm on the flat of the table, seething. Jaxon watches me, face set in stone, but doesn’t order me out. Julie is watching me now, her innocent, familiar brown eyes scanning my face as though she were reading a book. I lower my voice to a hiss. “Youdid.”
“I have to go, sis.” She glances at the clock on the wall behind me, then checks her watch as though to be sure it’s accurate. “I have a taxi waiting. I don’t want to miss it.”
“Julia, we’re not done here,” I warn. “When will you be back?”
“As soon as possible,” she promises, getting to her feet. At any other time, we would hug, clutching each other for dear life, tearing up at the thought of saying goodbye again. But we don’t. Not this time. Instead, Julie forces a fake smile, squeezes my arm, and looks for a guard to escort her out.
I watch my sister depart, more speechless than anything else. Everything has changed suddenly, so much since the night she called me on the phone, sobbing, hysterical, begging me to come over, that something had happened.
“Taylor,” Jaxon says behind me, drawing me back to this nightmare. “It’s time to go.”
Swallowing, I force my feet to move forward, following Jaxon back through the prison entrance and toward the strip search room.
“You’re awfully quiet.” Mr. Jaxon’s voice cuts through the silence of the hallway, interrupting the thoughts in my mind. He isn’t looking at me as we walk, but somehow, he notices anyway. He’s pretty observant, this one.
“Sorry,” I mumble, because I don’t know what else to say. “I’ll try to talk more.”
We stop in front of the search room and Jaxon holds the door for me. I take a seat on the edge of the medical cot as we wait for the female guards.
“That’s not what I mean,” he says, eyes scanning my face.
“Then what do you mean?”
“Did everything go okay with your sister? Julie, right?”
Hearing my sister’s name aloud makes me angry all over again, and I clench my jaw and shake my head, shrugging a bit to try and brush it off.
“It was fine.”
“Things looked like they were getting a little intense there.”
Silence settles between us, but I want to speak. To talk to him. To tell him.
“Yes, it’s my fucking sister.”
