Gabby could hear what Faith didn’t say. There was nothing accidental or heat-of-the-moment about Jessa’s death. She’d been hunted by her best friend’s paid killer. “Was I supposed to die, too?”

“The cause comes first.” Faith separated each word, emphasizing the horror. “And listen to you being all high and mighty, above it all, and disdainful because you don’t like the results this one time.”

Faith didn’t see how the power had corrupted her. Gabby didn’t know how a smart woman could miss it. “You think a lot of yourself.”

“Hypocrite.” Faith shook her head. Let out a heartless little laugh. “When it came time to make a deal to save your daughter and brother-in-law, you jumped right in. That result was fine.”

“I didn’t agree to that.”

“Maybe you weighed the pros and cons for a few seconds, and the guilt eats at you a bit, but when the decision was to keep all your secrets and guarantee your family’s safety, then—what a surprise—justice wasn’t a bright line. You shifted your beliefs and assigned blame to Darren. You probably felt justified doing it because a part of you decided Darren deserved being taken down.”

Gabby hated the ring of truth in those words. She had looked the other way when she figured out what Baines had done to his sister because proving it had seemed too daunting. She’d limited Liam’s role in Kennedy’s life because it was easier.

Still, she didn’t want to be lumped in any group with Faith. “I would point out I was blackmailed by Retta. That’s why my line shifted. She shifted it.”

“Poor you,” Faith said in a mocking tone. “And don’t throw around legal terms when you know better. You were faced with a decision, not blackmailed. You needed a way out, and you took it. Screw courtroom justice.”

Gabby refused to let that be true. “You’ve been doing this too long. You can’t separate out truth from fiction.”

“Retta and I were faced with similar decisions. Could she live with the murderer of her friend and godchild being made into a martyr? Could I live with women and children being used as legal fodder to ensure their powerful poor-me husbands remained free?” Faith let out a harsh laugh. “See, when you’re the one who needs to answer, you revise the question. Your sense of what’s right and what’s justice slides because the system doesn’t work.”

“Then change it from the inside.” Gabby knew it was a lame response. A knee-jerk one people threw around on social media when they secretly knew a good solution didn’t exist. “What you do is vigilantism, not justice.”

“If you do the former correctly, it becomes the latter.”