The Ex(87)

“I know you don’t want to hear this, Jack, but she’s not going to be okay.” At least on the surface, Buckley was doing fine, having finished her sophomore year at Brown. “She can’t have a normal life after what happened. You’re not protecting her.”

“I am for now.”

For now. That was as much as I’d ever gotten.

I was about to signal for the guard when Jack said, “You look good, Olivia. Happy.”

“I am, finally.” Unless he noticed the bump last year, he didn’t even know about Grace. I saw no reason to tell him. Maybe I was projecting, but I had the feeling he was keeping something from me as well. “You can tell me anything. You know that, don’t you?”

He nodded.

“Will you at least tell me whether she knows that you know?”

He smiled and shook his head. At least she had no idea that I had figured it out. Unlike Jack, I didn’t have a maximum-security prison to protect me.

“Not that it’s the same, Jack, but in a weird way, I feel like I lost twenty years of my life, because I squandered it. And now I’m free. And someday you will be, too. Call me the minute you’re ready.”


I TOSSED MY BRIEFCASE IN Grace’s car seat. It was a multifunction accessory.

Once I was behind the wheel, I checked my e-mail. Einer had scheduled four more interviews in the next two days. Lately, I seemed to spend more time as an employer than a lawyer. Don was determined to retire, at least as he defined that term. I knew he’d still have his hands all over every case, but he was insisting that I find a “me”—a younger lawyer who would eventually become a full partner.

More immediately, Einer was starting his third year of law school, and we needed someone—probably three someones—to begin training to replace him once he graduated.

I hit Reply. Einer, please cancel all the lawyer interviews. At some point, I’ll stop begging, but I refuse to hire someone until you tell me you’re going elsewhere. And why would you do that? Ellison, Randall & Wagner has a nice ring to it, don’t you think? Eventually he’d realize it wasn’t a pity offer. He was the perfect person for the job.

I was halfway back to the city when my phone rang. It was a familiar number. I could hear the caller clearly through the car’s speakers. “Good news,” he said. “I didn’t think it would happen, but Miller just pled out. I’ll get Grace from day care, and was thinking about picking up some steaks for dinner?”

“Have I told you lately that you’re a really good husband?”

Only seven months old, Little Miss Grace Randall Temple was in her first weeks of part-time day care. I had never understood those mothers who fret about leaving their children with other people, but now I was one of them, and fortunately I had a spouse who shared my dedication to figuring out a schedule that made sense for all three members of our family.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

My husband, still at the district attorney’s office, knew about my annual visits to Jack, but had no idea of the real reason behind them. It was, to my knowledge, the only secret between us.

“I’m good, Scott. Thanks.” As usual, we exchanged I love yous before I hung up.

One of these days I would tell him. I still wasn’t certain, but until I heard otherwise, I believed Buckley never meant for her father to be convicted. I had seen her face when I told her about the GSR results. She was devastated, but not for the reason I assumed at the time. At some point after the shooting and before the police arrived at the apartment door, Buckley must have hugged her father. That’s why his hands were clean and his shirt was dirty. That was her first mistake.

But even with the GSR, I could have gotten an acquittal. Buckley’s big slip was letting their home’s IP address show up on a log-in to the “Madeline” e-mail account. It wasn’t Jack’s laptop that had been used for those e-mails. It was Buckley’s.

Jack had known it was Buckley the moment he heard Tracy Frankel’s name among the victims at his arraignment. That’s why he had turned to look at her.

Tracy had been stopping by the apartment, trying to shake him down for money. But then Jack’s underage mistress made the fatal decision of going to Buckley and telling her that her next stop was Malcolm Neeley.

Jack, in typical fashion, had tried to brush it off, telling his daughter that the girl was just troubled. Confused. He’d handle it. But Buckley wasn’t like her father. He was the kind of person who needed to be protected, even if it was by his sixteen-year-old daughter. She, on the other hand, was willing to take care of business.

They both had to go. Killing Malcolm Neeley and Tracy Frankel had allowed the Harris family to maintain the myth. Poor Clifton Hunter just happened to be there.

When you’re a criminal defense lawyer, you get used to trying to understand why people do horrible things. I was still trying to understand Buckley. She was a little kid who made her mother take a later train because she didn’t wake up on time one day—a day that just happened to be the morning a boy named Todd Neeley opened fire in Penn Station. She saw her father become consumed with Malcolm Neeley, because blaming the shooter’s father was easier than blaming his own daughter. And then one day, she realized that if anyone was to be blamed other than her or a mentally ill boy, it was Jack.

She could have left Jack out of it. She knew where to find Neeley on Wednesday mornings. Luring Tracy there would have been easy—a quick call from a blocked number, asking her to meet to pick up her blackmail money. But Buckley was also angry that her father’s infidelity had put them in this position. Maybe she hired the woman in the grass as a test—to see if her father would yet again take the bait of an attractive girl with long, dark hair.