Page 152 of Never Alone
"Then we do it."
She crossed the kitchen and put her arms around me, carefully, around the sling, and pressed her face into my shoulder for a long count. Her ribs were sharp through Jamie's shirt. The place between her shoulder blades went slack against my palm, then re-tightened as she remembered to keep standing.
I held her with the one arm I had.
She had come home. The woman who had come home was going to end it.
CHAPTER 28
Tessa
Miranda had a room in her office that I had not been in before.
It was the kind of room a law office had on the inside, behind doors a client didn't see. Bare table. Four chairs. A window with the blinds half-pulled. The light through the slats fell in stripes across the table the way it would have fallen on a witness in a movie.
There was a man in a suit who was not a lawyer. Detective Wilson. He was in his fifties, gray at the temples, the kind of contained presence that filled a room without taking it up. He shook my hand when I came in.Ms. Marin—Miranda had told him what I went by. He told me he was sorry I was meeting him under these circumstances. His grip was steady. He had probably said the same sentence to a hundred women before me. He had probably meant it every time.
"I'm glad you're here," I said.
He nodded once.
Miranda walked us through the plan.
I was going to call Nicholas. Tonight. I was going to tell him what we had agreed I was going to tell him. That I had been thinking. That the past few weeks had been hard. That I was not sure I was as okay as I had thought I was. I was going to ask himif we could meet. Just to talk. He could pick the time. I would pick the place. Somewhere public. A hotel bar.
He would say yes.
He would say yes because he had been waiting eight months to hear me say what I was about to say. He would say yes because in his head, the men in masks had worked. He would say yes because his version of the story was that I had always come back to him, and now I was coming back, and that was right.
Detective Wilson explained the wire.
He showed it to me. It was smaller than I had expected. He showed me where it would go. Under my shirt at the sternum, taped flat. He explained the receiver in the surveillance van. He explained what the legal threshold was for what Nicholas had to say.
He didn't have to confess to the assault.
He had to confess to the pattern.
Miranda had a list of phrases that would meet the legal threshold. Anything about controlling my movements. Anything about tracking my money, my phone, or my friends. Anything that framed his behavior as love.I had to know where you were. I had to keep you safe. I did it because I loved you.If he said anything close to those, the wire was admissible.
She told me he would say it because he believed it.
"Tessa." Miranda set the list down. She looked at me across the table and waited until I was looking back. "I want to be clear with you. We are not asking you to do this. If you walk out of this room and say no, we go forward with what we have. We have enough to charge him. The wire makes it faster. It does not make it possible."
She let the words land. She didn't fill the room around them.
"I know."
Miranda kept her eyes on me. She had a way of holding still while she waited for a thing.
"You can say no."
I'd known I could say no since Cole had told me what Miranda had asked. I'd known it on the drive home from Savannah. I'd known it walking into this room.
I put my hands flat on the table. The wood was cool through my palms.
"I know."
She watched my face. She had her answer before I gave it.
