Jack turned to her, eyes narrowed, and Belle told herself to stop talking. She’d distrusted Jack for so long. She’d had reason to distrust Jack and Raven, but their crimes felt minuscule in comparison to the horror unfolding around her now. Someone had framed her for the murder of Evelyn Holloway. Now Jack was locked up beside her, but it couldn’t have been Lily who was punishing them for their adolescent plot.

Belle knew it for a fact.

“Lily was with me that night,” she said softly. “We started talking a few months after Raven went to boarding school, and by the time he was on his way home, she and I were…”

“Close,” Jack finished, and mercifully didn’t ask her to elaborate. For that, Belle was grateful. Belle’s entanglement with Lily was nothing to be ashamed of, but for the time being, it was theirs. She didn’t want to share it. She especially didn’t want to detail the greatest night of her life while locked in a dingy cell with the person she’d hated for years.

Those moments had been sacred. Those kisses, life affirming. And that touch… no, she wouldn’t sully the beauty of what they had just to convince Jack of Lily’s innocence.

“She got to my house around ten thirty,” Belle said, because this was the important part. The timing. The facts. “According to the police, Evelyn was killed between eleven and one. Lily couldn’t have done it. She was with me that whole time, which means—”

“She’s covering for her dad.”

Belle nodded, a heaviness pressing into her chest. “When the cops showed up at my door in the middle of the night, I thought they were there because Lily had snuck out of the facility. I sent her out the back door. By the time I realized they were there to arrest me, she was long gone.”

“And you thought she’d gone back to the facility.”

“Yes. I thought she’d get in trouble if anyone knew she’d broken out. They’d punish her, or drug her up, or send her to a higher-security facility. So I kept quiet when the detective asked about my alibi. I thought I was protecting her, when all that time she could’ve been protecting me. She could’ve told the truth instead of claiming she was with her dad.”

“Why would she throw you under the bus to protect him?”