Page 81 of Guess Again

Milwaukee, Wisconsin Monday, August 4, 2025

THE MEMORY OF THAT NIGHT WAS STILL HEAVY ON HER MIND AS LINDSAY pulled up to her house.

Her training had taught her coping mechanisms and ways to compartmentalize her feelings about that time of her life.

In the immediate aftermath, Lindsay had distracted herself by working hard to win Blake back.

She gave him a month to grieve and get over the confusion that came with losing the mother of his child.

Lindsay waited for the investigation to die down, too. Then, she tried to rekindle what had once been between her and Blake. When Blake rebuffed her efforts, she decided to give him more time.

She visited his apartment late at night during her junior year of college, only to find that he was wholly uninterested in her.

She tried again after she graduated and started her business, stupidly believing that Blake would be impressed with her success.

Eventually, though, over the years Lindsay understood that no matter how badly she wanted to recapture the magic they had once shared, Blake did not.

So, after years of rejection, Lindsay’s impetus morphed from lust to revenge.

She had treated clients over the years who suffered from OLD—obsessive love disorder—and she was not so blind as to miss the telltale symptoms of the disorder in her own life.

She knew she was in the throes of the affliction, and decided the only way past it was to find closure.

And closure would come only after she delivered justice to Blake Cordis.

She thought long and hard about how to do it, settling on the idea that the prepaid cell phone she had kept hidden for years would be the perfect tool.

Lindsay knew the phone was the perfect way to exact her revenge, but still she had never been able to go through with it.

Despite her frustration, there was an ember of love for Blake Cordis that remained insufferably glowing.

It represented a tiny morsel of hope that perhaps they would someday get back together.

That tiny ember had prevented her from pulling the trigger on her plan over the years.

But it had finally gone dark when Lindsay learned of Blake’s love affair with Portia Vail.

In one torrid night of alcohol and Valium, Lindsay formulated a plan to abduct Portia Vail and frame Blake for it.

The scheme came fully together after Ethan Hall was tapped to reopen Callie’s case.

Suddenly, Lindsay knew whom she would give the prepaid Samsung to.

And when she started seeing Eugenia Morgan as a client, the pieces of her revenge began to align.

The poor woman was suffering from hybristophilia and in love with a convicted cop killer named Francis Bernard. When Lindsay looked into Francis Bernard’s history, she learned that the man’s past was intimately connected to Ethan Hall. It was then that Lindsay’s plan took an unexpected, but utterly perfect, turn.

For years, The Anonymous Client had done pro bono work for prison systems around the country, offering psychological care to inmates.

When she rooted through the requests waiting for her approval, Lindsay reviewed the list of inmates at the Wisconsin Secure Program Facility seeking mental health exams.

On the list was none other than Francis Bernard.

Lindsay took the pro bono case, and within a week was sitting face-to-face with the man who had killed Ethan Hall’s father.

Only attorneys and doctors were allowed personal interaction with inmates at the maximum security prison in Boscobel.

Lindsay’s first session with Francis Bernard took place in a small conference room rather than at the visitation booth where a pane of glass would have separated them, and where their conversations might have been overheard through the prison’s phone system.

In that quaint meeting room, Lindsay had laid out the details of her offer.

She knew after a single session that Francis Bernard was desperate for a transfer to a more humane prison, and that he would do anything to be liberated from solitary confinement.

Lindsay informed Francis that for a chance at such a request, he’d need to pass a psychological evaluation, which Lindsay offered to facilitate if he gave her something in return.

If Francis agreed to lead Ethan Hall to certain bits of evidence that Lindsay planted—specifically, the prepaid Samsung phone and Portia Vail’s whereabouts, which Francis could use as leverage—then Lindsay would repay Francis by signing off on a psychological evaluation that would spring him from the WSPF and put him on his way to Columbia Correctional Institute.

Lindsay’s plan was so meticulous that she never considered Francis had one of his own.