Her eyes were huge and dark and sorrowing. “I’m sorry, Bree, but if you’re right, if this is about something Trey and Spencer did together, the chances of this woman calling you back at this point . . .”

I shook my head. “It’s one thing to send me to kill a man she hates in a garden far away. It’s another thing to—” I couldn’t finish. I looked back and forth between her and Marshall, tears finally breaking out and spilling down my cheeks. “She’s held him all day. Fed him. He’s such a good baby, and he’s lost that newborn scrawny look. He’s fat and pink and sweet. He learned to smile last week, and it’s all lopsided and toothless. I don’t see how she could, no matter how much she hates Trey. She’s a mother. It would be so personal.”

“That’s true,” Gabrielle said, and I saw a little of my hope leach into her features. “Okay. But I am going to go call Leticia and ask a few hypotheticals. To know your liability.”

She took her cell phone and headed out down the hall that led to my formal living room. I thought she’d agreed mostly because I was the client. I knew the firm’s first rule from Trey: Keep the client happy.

“You should listen to her.” Marshall looked grave. As an ex-cop, he’d seen levels of cruelty that Gabrielle and I had never known.

There was no way to explain my hope without sounding unhinged, so all I said was, “If I’m wrong, it doesn’t matter.” I could not stop there. I would have to say the most awful thing, out loud, to convince him. “If I’m wrong, she’s already killed him, and I don’t care what happens to me.”

Marshall rubbed at his eyes, then nodded. He looked sick, but he stopped arguing. We would do this my way. He got up and gathered the coffee cups, taking them over to refill them. “It’s going to be a long night.”

It was. The longest. I was trying to decide what “morning” meant. A minute after midnight was the start. But midnight came and went with no call.

We got more coffee and went to sit on the big sectional sofa. Marshall moved the artifacts to the coffee table gingerly, hoping for fingerprints, I thought. But I’d already touched those things all over.

When Gabrielle finally finished her phone call and came back, I said, “We’ll talk about it later,” before she could begin.

She fell asleep around two, her bare feet propped on an ottoman. Marshall dozed as well, listing sideways on the sofa. I listed with him, until I looked up and saw Trey sitting across from me in his favorite chair. I wanted to run to him, hurl myself into his arms, but I was also instantly so angry.