He started to walk away, then came back. “Okay, I know you don’t want to hear it, but ask her if either she or the boyfriend were in any way detained or arrested. Find out if the store filed charges against them. If they didn’t, you’re golden.”

“I got this,” Drue said, turning back to her phone.

“Hi. Vyckylynn? Are you still there?”

“I got no place else to go,” the caller said, smacking her gum loudly.

“Were the police called? Were either of you arrested and charged?”

Click. Her caller had disconnected.

The office was deserted. She’d watched while the rest of the staff drifted out of the building, headed off for their weekend plans. Her own weekend plans consisted of ordering takeout pizza and using her first paycheck to start painting the cottage.

Somewhere outside, a car backfired and an image flashed in her mind: of Yvonne Howington, and her Plymouth, and the face of Aliyah, as she peeked from the backseat of her grandmother’s rusted car. It had been a busy week, but every time she’d looked up she’d seen the child’s mermaid drawing pinned to her cubicle wall, and she thought about Aliyah’s mother, Jazmin.

Drue logged back on to her computer and toggled around the firm’s database, looking for the Jazmin Mayes file. She pulled up the file and looked guiltily around the empty room.

Wendy had left shortly after five, and she hadn’t seen Brice at all that day, which wasn’t an unusual occurrence.

Drue had signed a nondisclosure agreement her first day of work, and she’d had the words “client confidentiality” drilled into her brain every day since. As far as she knew, there wasn’t an official policy forbidding her from removing files from the office, but she could assume such an action wouldn’t meet Wendy’s approval.

She pushed the Print button and stood nervously over the printer, snatching up each page as it slid onto the paper tray and shoving it into her backpack.

While she waited for the documents, she thought again of all the unanswered questions surrounding Jazmin Mayes’s murder. Why had she agreed to work a later shift, knowing she needed to get home in time for her mother to leave for her own job? Who was the supervisor whom Jazmin told Yvonne was sexually harassing her? Had she reported the harassment to management? And if so, what, if anything, had been done?

The printer clicked off and Drue leafed through the stack of sheets she’d accumulated. Less than three dozen pages? Was that all the life of a twenty-four-year-old mother amounted to?

She was unlocking OJ in the law firm’s parking lot when her phone dinged. The text was from Ben.

Still here. U coming?