Summer (Four Seasons #2) (28 page)

Brandon leans forward, grinning at us both, and says, “Well, this is super fucking awkward, huh?”

Avery shoots him a look that could freeze hell over. I want to smile back at him, to laugh at just how ridiculous he is for pointing out the obvious at a time like this, but I can’t. I don’t have it in me. “It’s okay, Brand,” Avery says under her breath. “Annie’s right. We just have to get through this and be civil. After that, we can all go our separate ways and we won’t have to do this anymore.”

She has every right to be angry with me. She has every right to be hurt. But hearing her speak that way, desperate to get away from me, counting down the seconds until she can flee the building, feels like a dagger to the chest. “Avery—”

“
Don’t
,” she hisses. Closing her eyes, she draws in a deep breath. “Just don’t. It’s better if we don’t talk to each other at all. You didn’t want to talk to me last night. Or for the last four months for that matter. I’m sure you can maintain your silence a little longer.”

Brandon grimaces, eyebrows halfway up his forehead, and slowly sits back. This is awful. I knew after everything that’s happened it was going to be bad, but right now I want the ground to split open and swallow me whole. I’ve been desperate to see her for so long, and now I’m here, sitting right next to her, I have no idea what I should say to try and make this better. A small voice in the back of my head is telling me I shouldn’t even bother trying. She clearly wants nothing to do with me, so why make this worse than it already is. That’s the coward in me talking, though. That fucker is responsible for me severing all ties with her in the first place. He ruined my life. I won’t be listening to him ever again.
 

 
She’s worth fighting for. She’s worth pleading for. She’s worth working for. I’ll do anything and everything I can to try and mend what I’ve destroyed. That’s what my grandmother always used to say when she was alive: ‘
if something’s broken, you don’t throw it away. You fix it.’

“I’m sorry, Avery,” I whisper. “I know that isn’t enough. I know it’s not going to repair the damage I’ve done.”

She gives me this look out of the corner of her eye, and by rights I should be frozen solid, cast out of stone. Medusa sure as hell would have been proud of that one. “Do you even want to repair it, Luke?”

“
All rise
.” The court clerk stands, chair scraping on the tiled floor, and then the D.A. makes his way into the courtroom, walking with purpose as he approaches the bench and climbs the steps up there. He’s young for a district attorney. There’s barely any gray in his hair, and from the way he smiles at the attendant who pours him a glass of water, he isn’t completely jaded by life just yet. Everyone stands, and the proceedings begin.
 

Chloe Mathers has lost weight since the last time I saw her, too. Twenty odd years of policing will help you gain a few pounds, especially if you’re not diligent about your exercise, but now Chloe’s leaned out a little. She’s wearing a plain white t-shirt, along with plain blue prison issue pants, and she looks like she’s been working out. A lot. She must be in her late forties now, but she looks like she’s in the prime of her life.

Avery locks up the second Chloe is brought, handcuffed, into the courtroom. Pride sings through me when she manages to avoid looking at her, though. Not once does my beautiful girl give the psycho on the stand the pleasure of acknowledging her. A huge part of me wants to wrap my arm around Avery’s shoulder and hold her to me, protect her from Chloe in whatever way I can, but I can’t. I don’t have the right to do that anymore. I’ll be sitting on my hands by the end of the day. I had no idea how hard it was going to be to sit next to her and have to stop myself from trying to touch her or have some kind of physical contact with her. I want to kiss her. God, I want that so much.

District Attorney Whitlock speaks to the court, explaining that he’s reviewed Chloe’s case file extensively, and then he goes on to say that he plans on making a judicious decision regarding her case based solely on the facts that are presented to him today, and not on whatever he may have heard or watched on the news before. He introduces Annie to the court, and then he introduces Samuel Wochek, Chloe’s lawyer.
 

Normally in situations like this, the witnesses are asked to give their testimonies quickly, at the beginning of the day to avoid any unnecessary distress to be caused to them, but the defense requests that the police reports be assessed first. Whitlock grants Wochek this. It’s a cold, calculated move on Chloe’s lawyer’s part. Chloe knows all too well how this shit works, too. I wouldn’t be surprised if she made the initial request. The longer they keep me and Avery in the courthouse, going over what happened from every possible angle, quibbling over the finest details, the more upset Avery’s going to be when she finally takes the stand.
 

Three hours. Three hours, and we sit there in silence as they talk about the ballistics reports from the basement at Avery’s old house. They try and spin it so that the angling of the gunshots was recorded incorrectly, making it impossible for Chloe to have shot either one of us. When that’s disproven by Annie and her team—thank god—the defense moves onto Avery’s drugging. They try to claim that her labs came back containing very low levels of any reported toxin, and then they try to say that Avery was actually drunk when she fell into the pool.
 

That has Brandon’s hackles up, as well as my own, but Avery just sits there, immobile, staring at the back of Annie’s head, not letting anything faze her. Annie shoots down that claim, too, pointing out that Avery had almost bled out by the time she reached hospital. She received three blood transfusions during the ninety-minute mad dash where the doctors rushed to save her life. It stands to reason that there wouldn’t be much poison in her system after that.

We break for lunch. Everything tastes like cardboard. Avery vanishes into the ladies’ toilet and doesn’t come out until it’s time to go back into session.

Chloe grins at us as we make our way back to our seats, and I’m hit by the strangest of sensations. I worked with Chloe for a while at the Breakwater Sheriff’s department before I retrained and moved over to the NYPD. She was a mentor to me, a friend. I had no idea what madness laid beneath her offers to fetch me a coffee and her bad Hilary Clinton impersonations.
 

Seeing her here like this, clearly so unhinged and desperate for attention, I find myself questioning how I missed it.
 

I’m called up to give my account of that night by the swimming pool. I get through it quickly the first time, not wanting to linger over the encounter, but predictably Chloe’s attorney makes me go over my testimony three or four times, trying to catch me out. Did I harbor any resentment toward Chloe from when I worked in Breakwater? Did I want to come back to Break and become Sheriff myself? The implications get crazier and crazier. The old, bird-like guy defending Chloe even dredges up some bullshit warning I was given by Chloe for underage drinking when I was fifteen at a friend’s party. By the time I climb down from the stand, my blood is buzzing in my veins and I’m angrier than all hell. More than that, though, I’m worried. Worried for Avery.
 

They’re going to try and pick her to pieces. If I could get up there and give her testimony for her, I would. And fuck. If Wochek brings her to tears, I’m going to be vaulting over the damn railings and punching his lights out. I won’t be able to stop myself. My skin feels like it’s rippling with electricity when I sit back down next to Avery.
 

I half expected her to avoid looking at me while I was speaking, the same way she’s been avoiding looking at Chloe, but she didn’t. She watched me intently, her eyes never leaving my face, and now she turns and looks at me, too. She doesn’t say anything, but I can tell she needs something from me. Something that will make this less terrifying.
 

“The defense now calls Ms. Avery Patterson, formerly known as Iris Breslin,” the clerk calls out.
 

Avery stands, and I don’t care anymore; I reach out and take her hand, squeezing it tight. I say the first thing that comes into my head, and I know it’s going to affect her. I know it’s going to hit her hard, but she needs it right now. She needs it to be strong.
 

“
Fly high, Icarus
.”

TWENTY-SIX

AVERY

One minute I feel like I’m about to fall face-first off a cliff edge and each and every bone in my body is about to shatter on the descent. The next minute, Luke is taking hold of my hand and he’s whispering three words to me, and I feel like my bones are made of steel. I want to throw up. I want to cry. But I’m also so fucking determined to make it through this that I know I won’t be broken. They
can’t
break me. I won’t panic, and I won’t crumble. It’s obviously Wochek’s goal to make me do just that, but I won’t give him the satisfaction.

Chloe Mathers can go fuck herself.
 

I take the stand with my back ramrod straight, chin held high, and I see the small smile forming on Luke’s face in the gallery. I know I’m off to an excellent start. Wochek starts in on the questioning, trying to turn me around, trying to make out like I’m confused about what really happened. Maybe I didn’t lock all the doors and windows in the house that night. Could it be that maybe I, in fact, left the backdoor open and Chloe made entry into the property to simply make sure I was okay?

No. I definitely locked all the doors and windows. It was cold out. There was a storm that night. It was snowing like crazy.
 

And what if I’d been drinking that night? Could I have thought Chloe was trying to attack me when in actual fact she tried to help me when my boyfriend at the time, Mr. Lucas Reid, was pressuring me to have sex with him? Could it be that I’m now trying to cover up an attempted rape on his part?

 
No. I hadn’t been drinking. And there’s no way on this earth that Luke would ever do that. Besides, if he had, I wouldn’t frame an innocent woman of something like that in order to protect him, would I?

Okay. Well if not that, then perhaps something more accidental. I was bullied at high school for years. Would I say that had caused me lasting mental distress?
 

Yes. Probably.
 

And so, wouldn’t it stand to reason that maybe I had accidentally shot Luke myself? We’d had a fight. Maybe Luke had come over to mend bridges and I’d gotten trigger happy, thinking he was one of my old school mates, trying to haze me.
 

No. I didn’t shoot Luke. I hadn’t been drinking. Luke didn’t try to rape me. Chloe Mathers was not trying to simply check up on me. She broke into my house wearing a ski mask and tried to murder me.
 

It all feels like it’s happening to someone else. I breathe deeply throughout the forty-five minute grilling. I don’t get flustered and I don’t stumble over my words. Luke sits on the bench next to Brandon, leaning forward, elbows on knees with his hands covering his mouth, but I can tell that he’s smiling from the way his eyes are creased at the edges. He’s proud of me. Brandon, too.
 

By the time Wochek is done with me, he looks mildly perplexed, like he expected that to go differently, and District Attorney Whitlock has a deep frown on his face, too. They call a fifteen-minute break, and everyone begins to file out of the courtroom. I have to pass the dock to get out, which means walking past Chloe. I shouldn’t look at her, shouldn’t acknowledge her, but a part of me is rebelling right now. Back in February, when we went through this the first time, Luke told me over and over again that Chloe just wanted to see me scared. She would get off on the fact that I was intimidated by her, that she held so much power over me still. I don’t want her to have that now. I don’t want her to think of me at all. As I walk past the dock, I look up at Chloe, and I look her straight in the eye. I don’t blink. I don’t look away, and I don’t let her see the tiny stab of fear that twists in my stomach. I look at her as though I’m looking straight through her, bored and uninterested, and I watch the quiet smugness slip from her face. It’s like watching a light spark and then fizzle out, disappearing into nothing right before me. Her lips part, and it looks as if she wants to say something, but nothing comes out of her mouth.
 

Brandon grabs hold of me as soon as I’m close enough, and then he’s crushing me to him, laughing quietly in my ear. “Good going, sweetheart. Fuck, you were great. She looks like she’s going to break down and start sobbing or something.”

It would be gratifying to turn around and witness that for myself, but I don’t care anymore. Instead I catch sight of Luke standing a few feet away. His hands are in his pockets, hair looking kind of crazy where he’s brushed it back out of his face, and his eyes are shining just a little too brightly. He grins at me, nodding, and then he slowly walks out of the courthouse.
 

TWENTY-SEVEN

LUKE

Whitlock doesn’t make a decision. It’s unbelievable, but he doesn’t. Rather than call us back inside after everyone’s milled around for ten minutes and grabbed bad vending machine coffee, the clerk comes out into the hallway and tells us that the DA is adjourning until the morning so he can deliberate. God knows what there is to deliberate about, but there it is. Brandon and Avery leave as soon as the announcement is made, and I drive Mom home. She’s wearing her
you’re kidding me, right?
face when she sees me climbing out of her truck. “You’re coming inside?” she asks.
 

“Shouldn’t I?”

Next comes her,
I raised you smarter than that, boy
face. “You love the girl, right?”
 

She’s probably going to smack me upside the head if I pretend I don’t know what she’s talking about. “Yes. Always have.”

“Then you’d be a fool to step foot inside this house. You should be heading straight on over to that ramshackle place that uncle of hers keeps. How long have you been miserable in California, pining over that girl? And now you’re in the same zip code as her and you have the opportunity to do something about it, to try and fix everything, you’re going to come in here and get under my feet, being miserable and stealing my beer instead? Does that make sense to you?”