Chapter 16

Jaime stared down at the concrete floor of his holding cell and watched as a spider scurried into a corner. The spider—some little brown thing with more legs than sense—crawled up the wall, to hang in a web it’d created between the cell door and the wall.

He wondered if this was a metaphor for his life. He’d gotten caught in a web, or maybe he was the spider stupid enough to create a web in a jail cell. He closed his eyes. He wished he could sleep, but the thought of closing his eyes in this place was unbearable.

So he stared at the spider and watched it rebuild a hole in its web instead of thinking about everything that had happened that day.

Of course, it was impossible not to think about what had happened. The knock on his door, the officers pouring in, the cold bite of cuffs on his wrists. That had been bad enough. But then Grace had shown up and seen him like that, and it had taken all of his strength not to beg her to leave. He couldn’t bear for her to see him as some criminal