Page 24 of Secrets of the Past (Secrets of Mustang Island #3)

“The timing,” Tripp continued, “is ten minutes before Ms. Laurent’s time of death, as established by the coroner’s report already in evidence. Would you like to revise your testimony?”

“I did not kill her,” Evelyn said. The smile was gone.

Tripp didn’t blink. “You say you were at home reading. What book?”

She hesitated. “I was alone.”

“Title?”

“I read many.”

“Your home’s security system shows your garage door opening at 10:01 p.m. and again at 11:53 p.m. Defense Exhibit B.” He lifted another sheet. “The security company authenticated those as well.”

A bead of sweat gathered at Evelyn’s temple, delicate as dew. Nicole watched it fall and felt a bleak, awful satisfaction. Truth had its own gravity.

Tripp let the jury sit with the contradiction, then turned another page. “Mrs. Reddick, after Ms. Laurent was killed, the murder weapon, a .38 special, was discovered in your son’s apartment. Are you familiar with the box in which it was stored?”

Her throat moved. “No.”

He slid a glossy photograph onto the evidence cart. The projector splashed it onto the screen above the jury: the upscale foyer camera still, time-stamped 11:18 p.m., Evelyn entering Derrick’s building in a dark pant suit, a rectangular manufacturer’s box tucked against her side.

A collective inhale scraped the room.

“Do you deny this is you, Mrs. Reddick?”

Silence. A tiny tremor touched her hands.

“Do you deny that the box in your possession matches the serial-labeled container of the weapon later found in your son’s apartment?”

She said nothing.

Tripp’s voice dropped, intimate and lethal. “Mrs. Reddick, did you carry the gun’s box into your son’s apartment the night Bianca Laurent was killed?”

“No!” She flinched and then, involuntarily, looked at Derrick. “Sweetheart, listen to me. I wasn’t trying to frame you. You had an alibi. I was—” She swallowed. “I was trying to…put it somewhere safe.”

Safe. Nicole’s pen stilled. The word was a ricochet.

“Because you possessed it,” Tripp said quietly. “Because you needed to hide it.”

Evelyn’s eyes flashed. “You’re twisting?—”

“Am I?” He moved one step closer, lowering his voice so the jury had to lean in.

“Mrs. Reddick, Bianca refused your demand. She told you she would keep her baby. You told Derrick she was unsuitable. You told him to focus on his future, not hers. So you drove to her home, you confronted her, and when she resisted the version of your life for Derrick, you tried to impose?—”

Evelyn’s lips trembled. For a flicker, Nicole saw the girl Evelyn might once have been, frightened, furious, feral where no one could see. Then the facade snapped back.

“She was going to ruin him,” Evelyn whispered.

Tripp didn’t move. “Did you kill Bianca Laurent?”

The courtroom held its breath. Nicole’s lungs burned.

In her mind, she saw the parlor again, the check, the word options, the way it had felt to be weighed and found unsuitable.

She thought of Bianca, young, brilliant, stubborn enough to want both a law degree and a life. She thought of Bianca’s baby.

Evelyn’s eyes hardened into diamonds. “That bitch was going to ruin my son.” The dam broke; the words poured out scalding.

“She wanted to trap him, tie him down with her bastard, and drag him through the mud. I had to do something.” She lifted her chin and unleashed the venom.

“And I didn’t want any brown babies in this family. ”

The world spun. A reporter’s pen hit the floor with a clatter like gunfire. Two jurors recoiled. Someone in the gallery sobbed. Derrick made a sound like trying to breathe through glass.

“I loved her,” he choked, bowing over his hands. “I loved her.”

Nicole stood before she knew she’d moved. Her voice came out level only because rage and sorrow propped it up on either side. “Your honor, the State moves to dismiss all charges against Derrick Reddick and asks that Mrs. Evelyn Reddick be taken into custody for the murder of Bianca Laurent.”

Judge Price’s gavel cracked like lightning. “So ordered.” He turned to the bailiffs. “Take the witness into custody.”

Evelyn tried to rise with dignity and found none. The cuffs clicked, cold punctuation.

“I did it for you,” she cried as they led her away. “For your future!”

Derrick couldn’t look at her. No one could.

Judge Price gazed at the jurors. “I want to thank you for your service. You are now dismissed.”

He rose and exited the chamber.

Court dissolved into human noise, jurors shepherded away, the gallery emptying in a messy current of shock, cameras lowered, whispers rising like steam. The official words, adjourned, dismissed, bounced off wood and marble and meant, for once, something like mercy.

Nicole sat because her knees decided they were done pretending. She was prosecutor enough to be grateful, woman enough to hurt. Justice was never clean. It cut on both sides.

The truth slid cold through her veins: twenty years ago, she could have been in Bianca’s place, different faces, same history, same trap.

She waited until the room had thinned, then gathered her files with careful hands and walked out on legs that felt like somebody else’s.

The hallway was cool. The fluorescent lights hummed.

She pushed through the first door on the left, the ladies’ room, and locked herself into a stall before the tremble reached her fingers.

For a long minute, all she could do was breathe. In. Hold. Out. Count the tiles. Count her heartbeats. Tell herself she was fine, even as her body told the truth.

When she finally stepped to the sink, her reflection stared back: composed, yes, but cracked at the edges. She pressed cold water into her wrists, then to her eyes. The past unspooled behind her like a film.

Seventeen. A sundress. A Mustang waiting, full of summer and forever. A parlor that smelled like lemon oil and judgment. Tripp’s mother, another elegant predator, explaining in a tone meant to pass for kindness that her son would never marry Nicole.

Nicole had stood her ground that day, shaking so hard, she thought her bones might rattle, and said no. It hadn’t mattered. The outcome had been the same: a future closed like a door in her face. A boy she’d loved going silent. Two families, deciding their fate.

And now Bianca.

Nicole pressed her palms to the counter until her ring bit skin. “I’m sorry,” she whispered, not sure to whom, Bianca, the unborn child, the seventeen-year-old version of herself who hadn’t known how to survive the avalanche. “I’m so, so sorry.”

The door opened. The woman who slipped in had streaks of gray braided into her hair and the kind of eyes that had cried more than once. Bianca’s mother. She met Nicole’s gaze in the mirror. Something like gratitude quivered there. Something like ruin.

“You fought for her,” the woman said softly. “Thank you.”

Nicole’s throat worked. “He did too.” She paused. “We should have all fought sooner, before it became a murder.”

The woman nodded once, as if they had exchanged something sacred and enough, and left.

Nicole dried her hands, squared her shoulders, and reassembled herself. Work first. Breakdown later.

In the corridor, the light found Tripp before she did. He stood by the stairwell door, jacket unbuttoned, tie loosened. For a heartbeat, he was eighteen again and everything was simple. Then the stairwell yawned behind him, and she remembered every complicated thing.

He didn’t speak as she approached. He just watched her. The look stripped away the room, the noise, the years. It scared her how much she wanted to step into it.

“You okay?” he asked at last.

“Define okay.” She managed a ghost of a smile. “I’ve been better. I’ve been worse.”

“I’m sorry, this case seemed to parallel our own lives.” His voice was low, roughened by something she didn’t want to name.

“Different people. Same song.”

His jaw shifted. For a second, she thought he might say her name the way he used to, make it a place she could go. Instead, he said, “You did the right thing in there.”

“So did you.” She glanced down the corridor toward the emptying courtroom. “You saved him. You gave Bianca…you gave her mother the truth.”

“We both did.” He looked at her longer than was safe in a hallway with windows. “Nicole—” He broke off, rubbed the back of his neck. “When I called Evelyn, I thought I knew how it would go. I didn’t know…” He swallowed. “I didn’t know it would sound like that. I suspected her of murder.”

“Neither did I.” Her voice frayed. She pulled it taut again. “But now we do.”

A silence opened, filled with everything they hadn’t said for years: I tried. I failed you. I was scared. They made me choose. I let them. I’m still angry. I’m still here.

He stepped aside, opening the stairwell door like a gentleman in a bygone century. She slipped into the cool echo of concrete and metal, and he followed.

“Tonight,” he said softly. “Seven. The restaurant on Sixth, the corner booth they always try to save for the judge.” The corner of his mouth lifted. “I bribed the hostess. She still owes me three favors.”

Nicole stared out the window at the reporters. A shiver rippled through her. If she said yes, she wasn’t just agreeing to dinner. She was agreeing to open the door that the past had slammed shut to see what had survived on the other side.

“Say no if you need to,” he added, so gently she could have cried. “Say later. Say never. I’ll take what you give.”

She looked up. The blue of his eyes was older now, complicated, capable of both mercy and cross-examination. The man who had cut a mother to the bone in defense of a son also looked like someone who could learn to hold a woman’s heart carefully this time.

“I’ll be there,” she said, and the ache that had lived under her sternum for years shifted, made room.

His breath left him, almost a laugh. “Seven,” he repeated, softer.

She nodded and turned to go before she changed her mind.

Outside, the sky was a hot, relentless blue.

Reporters waited at the bottom of the steps, microphones like the heads of curious birds.

Derrick stood a few yards away, shoulders hunched, his lawyer at his side.

When he saw Nicole, he straightened, eyes red-rimmed but steady.

For a moment, they simply looked at each other, prosecutor and almost-victim, the shape of a life returned to him still unfamiliar.

“I’m sorry,” she said quietly when she reached him. “For what you lost. For what I couldn’t see soon enough.”

He nodded. “Thank you,” he managed. “For…not making it about winning.”

“It was never about that.” And today, at least, that had been true.

She left him to the cameras and the questions, to the sweep of a life that had changed too quickly.

She walked down the steps into the noise, into the heat, into the city that would not pause for grief.

A breeze teased the hem of her skirt and, on its back, for the first time in years, came the fragile scent of something like hope.

Tonight at seven, she would sit in a corner booth and decide if the past had to own the future.

She would tell the seventeen-year-old version of herself, shaking, furious, unbroken, that sometimes justice arrived late but still arrived.

That sometimes the truth didn’t heal you cleanly, but it could set the bone right so it could knit.

Nicole lifted her face to the sun, closed her eyes, and let the light find every cracked place. Then she opened them again and kept walking.