Page 91 of Things We Left Behind

“Gee, maybe try to turn down the charm there, Master of the Universe. You might dazzle this woman into a faint.”

I shut the door of her Jeep and gestured toward the front of the prison. “Let’s go.”

We crossed the asphalt side by side, heading toward the monstrous monument of security. Earth-­brown sandstone and concrete formed the towering facility walls beyond the double barbed wire fences.

Women in beige jumpsuits huddled in groups in the dismal yard. The asphalt inside the fences was crumbling, dead weeds poking up through the cracks.

Sloane stopped suddenly on the sidewalk. “Why are you here?” she asked again.

“You already asked me that,” I reminded her.

She shook her head, sending that thick, blond ponytail swinging. “Fine. It’s Wednesday. Why aren’t you ruling the corporate world? And you can’t stand me, so what does it matter to you if I screw up this partnership with my friends? I’d think you’d be happy to watch me crash and burn.”

“If you manage to make a mess of things, there’s a chance you could be essentially setting your friends’ money on fire. More importantly, there’s a woman behind those walls who might suffer because of it.”

She closed her eyes and took a breath. “You’ve buried and forgotten so many things, I just assumed you were over that as well.”

She was wrong. I’d buried and forgotten nothing. Instead, I’d used it all as fuel.

“There are some things we never get over. Some things we hide from the light,” I said, patting my pocket only to remember I’d left my cigarette in the car.

Sloane lifted her gaze to the heavy gray clouds and wrinkled her nose. Her stud was a pale pink today. “I take it you used your creepy spy network to dig into Mary Louise’s case,” she guessed.

“I may have glanced at some files.”

My team had done a fast, deep dive, and I’d managed to pore over their findings between everything else I’d had todo today. By all accounts, Mary Louise Upshaw was a model prisoner who used her time inside to earn two degrees and start a creative writing program for her fellow inmates. My own legal counsel had reviewed her sentence and found it “absolute bullshit.” Which meant the justice-­seeking Sloane was probably about to have her heart shattered.

“So you think we might have a case,” she pressed.

“I think a lot rides on what she has to say,” I hedged.

The visitation room was more depressing than I’d anticipated. There were two rows of scarred folding tables sandwiched between cracked and faded vinyl chairs. The industrial tile floor was stained and peeling. Some of the ceiling tiles were missing between flickering fluorescent lights. There was something that looked suspiciously like mold climbing the walls under the glass block windows.

Sloane was clicking her pen and gnawing on her lower lip, her eyes wide behind her glasses. With a sigh, I gripped the back of her chair and pulled it and her into my side.

She stopped clicking her pen and frowned up at me. She’d always had that little line between her eyebrows that deepened when she was deep in thought…or pissed off at me. I wanted to run my finger over it.

“There’s nothing to be afraid of,” I told her.

“I’m not afraid.”

I looked down pointedly at the denim-­clad leg that was jiggling a mere inch from my own.

“Fine. I’m not afraid, I’m nervous. Okay?”

“What do you have to be nervous about? You get to walk out of here.”

“Thank you, Captain Obvious. But what if she’s wonderful? What if she really is in here based on some gross injustice? What if she’s lost all these years of her life to an unfair sentence?”

“Then you’ll help her.”

She went back to chewing on her lower lip for a few moments and then shifted to face me. Her knee was pressing into my thigh. Those green eyes were earnest. “What if her sentence was unfairly harsh but she’s a terrible person?”

I felt myself softening toward her. Just like her father, she wanted to make a difference in the lives of strangers. But Sloane didn’t have Simon’s unlimited capacity for forgiveness. Neither did I.

“Then we’ll talk afterward and figure out the best way forward. There’s no point wasting any mental energy on a scenario that hasn’t played out yet.”

She frowned. “You strike me as the kind of man who goes into every situation having considered every possible scenario.”