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I read the list of questions on the photograph of us, astonished by what I am reading.
Did the lawyer have ties to the defendant’s family?
Were key witnesses paid off or threatened?
Who handled the evidence, and could it have been tampered with?
Did the insurance company play a role in covering up the truth?
Were there any past complaints or investigations into Daniel Hart, or Hart Law as a whole?
Has Hart Law been involved in other suspicious cases?
Did Kevin Taylor pay Daniel Hart as bribery to set him free? Was there a deal struck?
Did the judge have a history of questionable rulings?
Who else could have benefited from the verdict?
Was the crash report fabricated? If so, how much were they paid? Who worked there at the time of the accident?
“What the fuck?” Bile rises in my gut and bubbles like a volcano as I flick through more photos and scribbled notes until I come across two almost identical-looking crash reports. They contradict one another but I can tell one is a fake immediately from the non-government-issued paper, because the specific texture looks different and the watermark is in the wrong place.
“Three fatalities. Mr. Robert Donovan, Mrs. Emily Donovan, and Ms. Riley Donovan.” I read their names out loud.
This is evidence from the crash that killed her family.
Which means my father defended the man she said killed them.
Has this been her plan all along? To expose my father for bribery and foul play?
My father is the most straight and honest person I know and would never do such a thing.
My jaw tightens and I let out a slow controlled exhale to contain the storm building within me when I read the email that stabs me through the heart.
I scan the lines of it, my focus now razor-sharp, and lock on to each word of the conversation between two betrayers. It’s from JuliefuckingHanson informing Arianna that she found the evidence she had been looking for and that the crash report from her family’s car accident was tampered with, and how she thinks my father paid the investigator to change it.
“Motherfucker,” I grit out between my teeth, and every happy feeling I’ve felt since I met Arianna disappears like a ghost on the wind.
As I pull my phone out of the pocket of my jeans, my blood races through my veins, but I remain as calm as a monk in meditation while I photograph everything in front of me. From Arianna’s theories to the coroners’ reports and lists of journalist names and numbers who work at various tabloids, along with case files she must have acquired from our archive.
Arianna doesn’t have a sore throat or a virus; she’s got backstabber syndrome and has been planning my demise for months behind my back with her core mission to ruin my family and everything we took years to build.
No way am I letting that happen.
Her betrayal won’t touch my father’s respected name.
Overwhelming disappointment takes hold.
I’ve been sipping sweet poison straight from the source and I’ve been sleeping in my bed with a snake.
I’m disappointed in myself for believing that I could trust her and that she was the one.
For being too blind to see what was in front of me all along: a traitor.
She used me. Tricked me with her killer curves and tempting lips.
Everything was a lie.