I lower my voice, move a little closer to Ella. “If it were only about me . . . but I have a little boy to think about.”

Ella nods as if she understands.

Of course she doesn’t. How could she?

“Don’t stay with him,” she says.

With that, she begins to back away, to return to her people. I reach for her arm and hold her in place for a moment more. I step forward, closing the gap between us so I can be certain that only she can hear what I’m about to say.

“Hold on to Gabriel, Ella,” I whisper into her ear. “You might think I’m the very last person on earth to take relationship advice from, but this is something I do know about. There’s nothing more important than being with someone you truly love.”

She reflexively turns around to look at Gabriel, who’s watching us. He nods at me and favors me with a smile.

I stood trial for a crime I didn’t commit for one reason: self-preservation. Simply put, accusing Stuart of killing Lauren would not have served my case well. Spouses pointing at one another is one of the oldest defense ploys in the book, and such claims are almost always rejected by juries. That would have certainly been true for me. I lacked any evidence of Stuart’s guilt, and the only result I could have achieved by implicating him was my own conviction. If I admitted that Papamichael gave me the gun, then I’d be putting the murder weapon in my own hands, something the prosecution could not otherwise prove. More importantly, Stuart was my alibi; if I had told the police he committed the crime, I couldn’t have taken the stand to say that we were both home, together, that night.

Perhaps, if I had asked him to take the blame he would have, but I doubt it. His loyalty to me was a product of the belief that we’d always be together. Once he realized one of us had to go to jail, I strongly suspect he would not have sacrificed his life for mine.

I could have worn a wire, and that way obtained the proof of Stuart’s guilt. But I didn’t know he would confess so readily, and I feared that if he figured out that I was turning against him, he would turn on me. That was a price I was unwilling to pay. Me in prison, and Stuart full of hate. He could have erased my very existence from Jacob’s mind. At five, my son is still young enough to be fooled that way. Within a year, probably less, he’d believe that I’d left him at birth and never once read him Mike Mulligan.

“I told you we would live happily ever after,” Stuart says as he moves over to me again.