Chapter One

One Year Later

OLIVIA

Grace was standing again. She'd been doing it for about two weeks now, pulling herself up on whatever was closest, the couch, the coffee table, Ethan's leg if he happened to be in the room, and then staring around like she expected applause for it, which she usually got.

"She's going to walk before her birthday," Ethan said from the kitchen. "I'm calling it now."

"You said that last month too."

"And I was closer last month than the month before that. It's a trend, Liv."

I was sitting on the floor with Grace, one hand hovering behind her back without actually touching her, because if I touched her she'd get lazy and just lean into my hand instead of doing it herself. She wobbled, grabbed the edge of the table, and let out this triumphant little shriek like she'd just won something.

"See," Ethan said, coming in with two mugs of coffee. "Trend."

He handed me one and sat down on the floor next to us, which for a man who ran a technology company worth more money than I could actually picture in my head, still surprised me sometimes, how easily he folded himself down onto the carpet in sweatpants with his daughter's toys scattered everywhere.

"You have a board meeting in forty minutes," I said.

"I have a board meeting in forty minutes and I'm sitting on the floor with my family. Both things are true."

"Elizabeth's going to kill you if you're late again."

"My mother has been threatening to kill me since I was seven. I've built up an immunity."

Grace let go of the table and stood there for a second, completely unsupported, her arms out like she was balancing on a tightrope, and then she sat down hard on her diapered bottom and laughed at herself.

"That's it," Ethan said, setting his coffee down and clapping. "That's my girl."

I watched him with her, the way he still looked a little disbelieving every time she did something new, like some part of him hadn't fully caught up to the fact that this was real, that he got to have this. I understood the feeling. I had it too, most mornings, waking up next to him and needing a second to remember that nobody was going to take it away this time.

My phone buzzed on the counter. I almost let it go to voicemail, because Grace had picked her toy giraffe back up and was trying to eat its ear, which meant I needed to intervene in about thirty seconds, but I glanced at the screen and saw it was Rachel.

"Hey," I said, putting her on speaker so I could keep both hands free.

"Okay, don't panic," Rachel said immediately, which is the exact thing you say when you want someone to panic.

"That's not how you open a conversation with me anymore, Rach. You know that."

"I know, I know. It's not an emergency. I just wanted you to hear it from me before you saw it somewhere else."

Ethan looked up at me from the floor. I mouthed the word what and he shrugged.

"Emily called me," Rachel said. "She still keeps tabs on the case, you know, because of everything with her sister showing up in the news last year. Anyway, apparently Marcus's lawyer filed something. An appeal."

I didn't say anything for a second. Grace dropped the giraffe and reached for my coffee mug, and I moved it out of her reach without really thinking about it, my hands doing the mother thing on autopilot while the rest of me sat very still.

"An appeal for what," I said finally. "He's serving life without parole. There's nothing to appeal."

"That's the thing. It's not about the sentence. It's about how some of the evidence was collected. Emily said something about the chain of custody on the stuff from the summer house, and something about you being unconscious for part of the original investigation, which apparently means your statement could get challenged."

"That's insane. I gave that statement three years ago. I've given it about six times since then."

"I know. I'm just telling you what she told me. I don't fully understand the legal part of it either."

Ethan had gone quiet next to me, which was its own kind of loud. I glanced at him and he was looking at the floor, at Grace's scattered blocks, but his jaw had that set to it that meant he was somewhere else entirely.

"When did the filing happen," he asked, leaning toward the phone.

"Sorry, hi Ethan," Rachel said. "Last week, I think. It hasn't hit the news yet, but Emily said it's probably a matter of time before it does, since her sister's got half of Chicago's crime blogs still watching this case because of the Emily connection."

"Great," I said. "So we get to find out our lives are unraveling from the same person whose sister spent a year insisting we killed her."

"Diane's not doing this," Rachel said quickly. "This is Marcus's lawyer, not her. I don't think she even knows yet."

Grace had lost interest in my coffee and gone back to the giraffe, gnawing on its ear with the focused determination of a baby who had two teeth and intended to use them on everything within reach. I watched her do it and felt the strangest disconnect, like I was standing outside my own body watching someone else's daughter chew on a toy while someone else's life fell apart in the background.

"Okay," I said, mostly to myself. "Okay. So what happens now."

"I don't know," Rachel admitted. "I think there's a hearing. Emily's going to find out more and call me back. I just didn't want you finding out from a headline instead of from me."

"Thank you," I said, and I meant it, even though thank you felt like a strange thing to say about news like this.

"I'm sorry, Liv. I know you thought this part was over."

"Yeah," I said. "Me too."

After we hung up, the apartment felt too quiet, even with Grace babbling to herself on the floor. Ethan reached over and took my hand, running his thumb over my knuckles the way he always did when he was trying to figure out what to say.

"It's probably nothing," he said. "Appeals get filed all the time. Most of them go nowhere."

"You don't believe that."

"I want to believe it."

"That's not the same thing, Ethan."

He didn't argue with me, because he knew I was right, and because arguing about it wasn't going to change whatever was already moving through the court system without either of us in the room. Grace crawled over and pulled herself up on his knee instead, and he picked her up automatically, settling her against his chest, and she immediately grabbed a fistful of his shirt and stuck it in her mouth.

"I have a board meeting," he said, but he didn't move.

"You have a board meeting," I agreed.

"I don't want to go."

"You have to go. Elizabeth will actually kill you this time, immunity or not."

He laughed a little, but it didn't reach his eyes the way it usually did. He kissed the top of Grace's head, and then he stood up, shifting her onto his hip while he reached for his jacket off the back of the chair.

"Call the lawyer," he said. "Not to panic, just to know what we're actually looking at. I don't want to hear about this from Emily's sister's T*****r feed before we hear it from someone who actually knows the law."

"I will."

"And Liv." He paused at the door, Grace still on his hip, watching me with that same steady look he'd had the day he told me he wasn't going anywhere. "Whatever this is. We've already survived worse than a piece of paper filed by a man in a jumpsuit."

"I know."

"I mean it."

"I know you do."

He kissed me before he left, quick and distracted because he was already late, and Grace waved one fat little hand at me over his shoulder like she understood something was wrong even though she was nowhere near old enough to. I stood in the doorway after they'd gone, listening to the elevator ding down the hall, and I thought about the last time I'd sat across from Marcus, in that visitation room, telling him he was a ghost.

You don't scare us anymore, I'd said.

I believed it when I said it. I mostly still believed it now. But somewhere underneath the belief was a smaller, colder thought I hadn't let myself finish in over a year, the one that had been sitting quietly at the back of my mind since the day he screamed after me in that hallway.

I'm coming for her next.

I picked up my phone and called the lawyer.

***