The Last Invitation (60)
Ouch. “That makes me sound like a psychopath.”
“No. I’m not making a good-person-versus-bad-person comparison. I’m saying you don’t take on other people’s anger and pain. You watch from a distance, not letting their emotional upheaval unbalance you.” Faith leaned forward, reaching her hand across the blanket, and touched Jessa’s foot. “It’s not a bad thing. In fact, in your job, where you deal with so much hate and the blurring between fact and fiction, it’s a necessity.”
“I wish Gabby hadn’t appeared in my life again.” Dealing with her, getting stuck between the position she wanted at work and a past relationship she wanted to forget, had thrown Jessa off stride and she never regained her balance. She’d been tripping and crashing and wallowing in self-doubt and a borderline case of self-loathing since she’d signed that damn affidavit.
Faith sighed. “She makes you feel bad about yourself. She always has.”
“So she’s the jerk.” Jessa really wanted Faith to agree.
“When one person in a duo thinks you’re great friends and the other doesn’t, it’s sort of incumbent on the one who doesn’t value the relationship to safeguard the person who thinks you’re friends. I don’t mean stay friends with someone you don’t like or don’t want to invest in, but to come up with an exit strategy that lets you both walk away as close to whole as possible.”
“And I didn’t do that.” She’d failed spectacularly in her handling of the Gabby issue. No question.
“You dealt with the problem by pretending she didn’t exist, which is human. Maybe not the best way but understandable. Who wants drama? Unfortunately, now you’re experiencing the fallout. She views you a certain way, and you hate it.”
As the enemy. Worse, as irredeemable. “All true.”
“Her life is on a downswing, and yours isn’t.”
And still Jessa felt nothing. “How does that help me?”
“Honestly, it’s time to break contact. It’s been years, so, maybe, forgive yourself and move on.” Faith picked up her chopsticks again. “If she needs help, let her find it somewhere else. You can’t solve Gabby Fielding’s problems.”
Chapter Fifty-Three
Gabby
Four hours. That’s how long it had been since the police started questioning Liam. He walked through the locked door separating the waiting room from the rest of the police station, then nothing. Hours and hours of nothing.
All she could do was stare at the entry pad and steel door, willing it to open and for him to come out. By the end of the second hour, her nerves had ramped up, and she fantasized about clawing and punching her way into the restricted area, but she stayed still. Didn’t draw attention.
When she looked up for what had to be the hundredth time, Liam stepped out. He would have rushed right past her if she hadn’t stood up and blocked his path. “Finally.”
“Gabby?”
They met in the middle of the busy room. He tugged her out of the fray when a man came in yelling. She couldn’t make out the words, but something about his neighbor. Officers listened and one escorted him away from the crowd of vending machine users and waiting visitors and into a back room.
She didn’t see anything else because Liam walked them outside. They traveled down the ramp to the parking lot before he started talking again. “What are you doing here?”
“Waiting for you.”
“Probably not a great idea.” He glanced up at the station’s second-floor windows before looking at her again. “They think I killed Baines. Hanging out with his ex might send the wrong message.”
She refused to apologize for caring about him. Past or not, he was family. “I’m still your sister-in-law.”
“Right, and if they think we’re having an affair, they might think we colluded and killed him.”
The words screeched across her brain. The leaps, assumptions, and what-ifs Detective Schone would need to make to land there were breathtaking. The thought of being under that much scrutiny without knowing it shook Gabby. “What did the detective say?”
Liam leaned against a metal railing. “She asked a hundred questions, all trying to pin me down and blame me for Baines’s death.”
Every time Gabby tried to make that connection, to think it through and play the timeline, her mind balked. “That’s unhinged. Why would you hurt your brother?”
“Because we were fighting over the business.” He broke eye contact for a few seconds, watching a police car pull into the lot and park instead. “That’s what the emails say.”
She stepped in front of him, forcing him to deal with her. “Emails?”
“They have a series of emails where I threaten Baines to tell me about the missing money or I’ll force him to talk. They say other things, too . . .”
“About us?” The tight control she had on those secrets, on those days when she grappled with the worst decision she’d ever made, unspooled.
Liam stuffed his hands in his pants pockets. “They think I followed through on my warnings but then lost control or something went wrong. Either way, the view is I went too far and killed Baines, then set the scene to look like a suicide.”
Liam as a killer. No, no, no. “You can’t . . . but . . .”