Chapter 6: The Confession She Didn't Mean to Give
"I didn't plan for her to d*e," Rebecca said.
The word landed in the room like something dropped from a height.
Julian went very still.
"What did you just say?"
"I said I didn't plan it." Rebecca's voice was flat now, stripped of its usual music.
"The brakes — that was Marcus.
I told him to frighten her.
To make her pull over, call for help, give me time to — I needed time.
She'd found something.
Documents.
She knew about the account transfers." She stopped.
Looked at her hands.
"I told Marcus to scare her.
That's all."
"That's all," Julian repeated.
"He went further than I asked." Her jaw tightened.
"I didn't know how far until after."
"And then you said nothing," he said.
"For two years."
"What was I supposed to say?
She was g0ne.
Lily was alive.
You were—" She stopped herself.
"I was grieving," he said.
"And you were moving in."
Rebecca looked at him with something that might, in a different face, have been genuine.
"I did care for Lily.
Whatever you think—"
"You poured water over her," Julian said.
His voice had gone very quiet.
The quietest I'd heard it.
"You shoved a sixty-three-year-old woman onto a marble floor.
You threatened a six-year-old child with the loss of the only person left who loved her." He set the DNA document down.
"Don't tell me what you did or didn't care about."
Rebecca's lawyer arrived eleven minutes later.
I know because Lily counted the seconds between the gate buzzer and the front door, whispering the numbers under her breath, her head against my arm.
She'd always done that.
Counted things when she was anxious.
I had forgotten until I heard it.
The lawyer — a sharp-faced man named Garrett — took Rebecca into the study.
Julian's own lawyer arrived by phone, then in person forty minutes after that.
The house filled with low voices and the sound of doors opening and closing.
Evelyn sat beside me on the settee.
She'd been seen by the house physician — two bruised ribs, nothing broken.
She'd refused to go to hospital until things were settled.
"You should have told me sooner," I said quietly.
"When you first suspected."
"You weren't ready," she said.
"You were still learning your own name."
That was true.
For the first eight months after the accident, I had been a woman with no history, living in a small town outside Edinburgh, working in a bakery because someone had been kind enough to offer me work when I had nothing.
My hands had known how to bake bread before my mind knew anything else about me.
"How did you know I was ready?" I asked.
"You stopped asking whether you had the right to come back," Evelyn said.
"You started asking how."
Lily had fallen asleep against my arm.
Her breathing was slow and even, the particular depth of sleep that comes after a long time of not feeling safe enough to fully let go.
Julian came back into the room.
He looked at Lily sleeping.
He didn't speak for a moment.
"Garrett is advising her not to say anything further," he said finally.
"But she already said enough.
With witnesses." He glanced at Evelyn.
"I need you to give a formal statement.
Tonight if possible."
"I've been waiting eight months to give it," Evelyn said.
He nodded.
Then he looked at me.
"I don't — I need you to understand that I don't know how to—" He stopped.
Started again.
"I believed she was g0ne.
I grieved.
I made choices based on that.
I let someone into this house, into Lily's life, and I—"
"Julian," I said.
He stopped.
"Not tonight," I said.
"There's too much tonight.
Whatever we need to say to each other — it can wait until Lily is safe and this is finished."
He looked at his daughter asleep against my arm.
"Is she safe?" he asked.
"Right now.
Is she safe?"
"Yes," I said.
He exhaled.
Sat down in the chair across from us.
Put his face in his hands for just a moment — one private moment — then straightened.
From the study, raised voices.
Rebecca's, then Garrett's, then Rebecca's again.
Then silence.
Then the sound of Garrett opening the study door and saying, in a carefully neutral tone, to no one in particular: "She'd like to speak to the police directly.
Tonight."
Julian looked up.
I looked at the door.
Evelyn folded her hands in her lap and said nothing, because there was nothing left to say.
But I had not yet seen the folder Evelyn had photographed.
And when Julian's lawyer handed it to me an hour later — all fourteen pages — I found something on page nine that Rebecca had not mentioned.
Something that changed the shape of everything I thought I understood about the night I went off that cliff.
Marcus Hale had not acted alone.
May you like
And the second name on that document was not one I recognized.
It was one Lily knew.
