Chapter Eight

Jules' POV

The holding cell smelled like bleach and old coffee and something underneath both of those things that I didn't want to name.

I sat on the edge of a metal bench bolted to the wall, my back straight, my hands folded in my lap like I was waiting for a bus. Like if I kept my posture right and my breathing even and my eyes dry, none of this would be real. Like the woman sitting in a jail cell would turn out to be someone else entirely and I could go home.

Except I didn't have a home anymore.

I pressed my palms flat against my thighs and stared at the floor. The concrete was gray, scuffed in the corners, marked with the ghost outlines of shoes that had shuffled across it a thousand times before mine. I wondered about all those people. Where they were now. Whether any of them had driven twelve hours through the dark to tell their husband they were going to have a baby only to find him in bed with a blonde.

I laughed. It came out wrong — short and sharp and hollow — and the woman in the cell across from me looked up from beneath her curtain of tangled hair, blinked once, and looked away.

Stop it, Jules.

I pressed my knuckles against my mouth. Breathed through my nose. Counted the scuff marks on the floor the way Nana used to tell me to count my blessings — start small, baby girl, start small and work your way up.

One. Two. Three.

I got to eleven before my throat closed.

Nana.

The word hit me the way it had been hitting me in waves since Mike's face — his awful, hollow, sorry face — and I had to press my palms so hard into my thighs that I could feel my own pulse beating back against my hands. I would not fall apart here. I would not. There was someone else to think about. Someone who needed me to hold it together, someone so small I couldn't even feel them yet, just a flutter, just a whisper, a little grape the doctor had pointed to on a screen two days ago with a smile and a congratulations, Mrs. Casey.

Mrs. Casey.

I was still Mrs. Casey. The divorce papers hadn't been filed yet. Somewhere in the tangle of the last twenty-four hours, that was still true. I was still his wife. I was sitting in a jail cell, I had just watched my grandmother's house burn to the ground, and I was still technically the wife of a man who had said go and meant it.

I put my face in my hands. Not to cry. Just to hide for a second. Just for one second where nobody could see me.

You're okay. You're okay. You're—

"Julia Rose Arthur."

I pulled my hands from my face. A guard was at the cell door, keys in hand, expression blank in the way of someone who had said too many names in too many doorways to feel much about any of them anymore.

"You're being released on bail." He said it the way you'd say the vending machine is out of chips. Informational. Impersonal. "Someone posted it. You've got a lawyer waiting."

I stared at him. "I don't have a lawyer."

"Well." He slid the key into the lock. "You do now."

---

The room they put me in was small and fluorescent-lit and smelled marginally better than the cell. A table. Two chairs. A paper cup of water that had been sitting long enough to go lukewarm. I sat in the chair nearest the door out of some instinct I couldn't explain — not to escape, just to be close to the exit, the way I'd been close to doors and windows and open roads my whole life.

The lawyer was already seated across from me when I came in, a manila folder open on the table in front of him. He was younger than I expected. Dark suit, clean shave, the kind of careful stillness that told you he knew how to be in rooms like this without letting rooms like this touch him. He looked up when I sat down, and his expression did something careful and deliberate that landed somewhere between professional sympathy and I have information you don't.

"Miss Arthur," he said. "My name is Cooper Hale. I'm here on behalf of a client who asked to remain anonymous. They've posted your bail and retained me to represent you. You don't owe them anything and there are no conditions attached."

I looked at him for a long moment. The fluorescent light buzzed faintly overhead.

"Nobody does that," I said. "Nobody does something like that with nothing attached."

"My client does." He held my gaze, steady and unbothered. "I can't tell you who they are. What I can tell you is that they are aware of your situation and they felt they owed you something. I'm the debt being paid."

I wrapped my hands around the paper cup. The water had gone cold all the way through. "What situation?"

Cooper opened the folder. He turned it to face me and slid it across the table. "Someone called in an arson tip naming you as the person who set the fire. They gave a statement placing you at the farm earlier that evening with — and I'm quoting — a gasoline container and stated intent." He paused. "They also provided a witness who claims to have seen you start the fire."

The room tilted. Just slightly. I pressed my feet flat against the floor.

"I didn't," I said. My voice came out very quiet and very certain, the way your voice goes when you're so far past desperate that you've come out the other side into something that feels almost like calm. "I wasn't there. I had just come from — I was driving back from the city. I pulled over by the fields. I didn't even know about the fire until I saw the smoke."

Cooper nodded slowly, like I'd said something he'd already expected me to say. "I know."

"The witness is lying."

"I know that too."

I stared at him. "Then who—"

"That's what I intend to find out." He closed the folder. Folded his hands on top of it. "In the meantime, the charges against you have been suspended pending investigation. You're free to go." He slid a card across the table. "My number. Don't leave the county for the next two weeks. Other than that, you're not required to stay."

I looked at the card. Cooper Hale. Attorney at Law. A phone number. No firm name, no address. I turned it over. Blank.

"Who sent you?" I asked again, softer this time.

He looked at me with something that wasn't quite a smile but was close to one. "Someone who felt they owed you a debt."

I picked up the card. My hands were steadier than I expected them to be.

---

They gave me back my phone, my keys, and the contents of my pockets. Everything in a manila envelope, sealed with a sticker that had my case number on it. I signed a form I didn't fully read. I walked down a corridor that felt about nine miles long and through a set of double doors and then I was outside.

The sky was pale gray and getting lighter at the edges. Morning. Sometime in the early hours while I'd been sitting on that metal bench counting scuff marks on the floor, the night had ended without asking my permission.

I stood on the steps of the county building and breathed.

The air tasted like dew and exhaust and the particular cold that only exists before the sun has properly committed to rising. I breathed it in anyway. In and out. In and out. The sound of traffic somewhere distant. A bird starting up somewhere in a tree I couldn't see.

I put my hand on my stomach. Just rested it there, flat against the fabric of my shirt.

"Hey," I said, quietly, to no one, to the bird, to the thin gray morning. To the little grape I couldn't feel but knew was there. "Sorry about last night."

The bird kept going. A car turned somewhere. The light at the edge of the sky inched from gray to the faintest, most reluctant kind of pink.

I thought about Adam. I couldn't help it. I thought about standing at his apartment door, the cold of the hallway, the way his face had looked when he'd said go — not cruel anymore, just flat, all the life behind his eyes switched off like a lamp. I thought about the blonde. I thought about driving twelve hours with an ultrasound photo in my center console and hope so bright it physically hurt.

I thought about the word go.

And then I stopped thinking about it. I put it in a box, the way I'd learned to do with all the things that would destroy me if I let them stay out in the open — my father's uniform folded in a cedar chest, my little sister's laugh, the lake in winter, the way Nana smelled like lavender and apples. I put Adam in the box, and I closed the lid, and I locked it and swallowed the key.

He doesn't want you. He never did. And that is done.

I had someone who did want me. Someone who had no choice in the matter but wanted me anyway, already, stubbornly, from nothing but a few cells and a heartbeat I hadn't even heard yet. Someone who needed me to be standing on my feet and not crumbling on the steps of a county building at six in the morning.

I pulled out my phone. The screen was cracked at the corner — it must have happened at some point last night, in the chaos I barely remembered. It still worked. I had four missed calls from a number I didn't recognize, two from Mike's office, and a voicemail I didn't listen to.

I opened the maps app and typed in the only address I had left.

Nana's church. Pastor Graham would know where the body was being held. He would know who to call about the farm. He had known Nana for thirty years and he would look at me with kind eyes and it would almost, almost be enough to get me through the next hour.

Just the next hour. That was all I needed to get through.

I walked to my truck. I got in. I turned the key and the engine turned over, rattling and familiar, and for one second I gripped the steering wheel and pressed my forehead against it and just breathed — one long, shaking, ugly breath, the kind that costs you something, the kind that takes whatever's left in the tank and burns it.

Then I sat up. Squared my shoulders. Checked my mirrors.

Okay, Jules.

I pulled out of the parking lot as the sun finally made its decision and came up over the rooftops, pale and clean and indifferent and beautiful, throwing long shadows down an empty street.

Okay.