He’ll try to discredit you.
He’ll try to discredit Marcus.
He may try to make me look unstable.” I looked at her directly.
“Are you prepared for that?”
“I’ve been preparing for it for five years,” she said.
“Every time I sat across from him at dinner, I was preparing for it.”
I believed her.
Three days later, Daniel’s lawyer sent a formal letter through Patricia.
It was addressed to me.
It offered a private settlement.
No admission of wrongdoing.
A sum of money.
In exchange, Ava would recant her statement and I would withdraw my cooperation with the investigation.
I read it at Patricia’s office.
When I finished, I set it on her desk.
“No,” I said.
Patricia picked up her pen.
“I’ll draft the response.”
“Make it short,” I said.
She almost smiled.
“I will.”
On the way home, Ava asked what the letter had said.
“He offered money to make it stop,” I told her.
She was quiet for a moment.
“What did you say?”
“No.”
She looked out the window.
After a long pause, she said: “Chloe would have said the same thing.”
I didn’t answer.
But I reached over and put my hand briefly on hers.
That was enough.
The accident reconstruction took eleven days.
I learned more about that road than I ever wanted to know — the grade of the curve, the drainage pattern, the tire marks still faintly visible in the shoulder after five years.
The original investigators had concluded driver error consistent with an inexperienced teenager in wet conditions.
The new team looked at the same road with different questions.
Patricia called on a Wednesday afternoon.
“The reconstruction is inconsistent with Daniel’s account,” she said.
“The point of impact and the vehicle’s trajectory indicate the car was traveling faster than he claimed, and the steering input in the final seconds is inconsistent with a correction.
