Gavin smiled on the inside. Reecey’s objection was how to get a phone past a jailer, not the ethics of providing a phone to an inmate. He liked where this lawyer’s head was at.

“Not here,” Gavin said. “You’ll bring it to court. I have a Rule Eight hearing coming up. When we meet in the holding cell at court, you let me send her a text message or two—whatever it takes to get her to come in and give a statement. I need to convince her how important this is. That’s all you have to do, and the fifty grand is yours.”

Reecey stared at Gavin as he considered the proposal, and Gavin could almost see the man contemplating the boat he would buy with the money.

Gavin had gamed his moves with precision; the only gamble in the plan was getting his hands on a cell phone. His freedom, his life, everything hinged on finding an attorney willing to turn a blind eye.

Gavin held his breath as the lawyer weighed right versus wrong. When Reecey finally made the decision, it came not with a smile or handshake but with the slumped shoulders of a man who had just calculated the price of his integrity.

Chapter 29

Chapter 29

Andi had taken that Friday off, which gave Lila three days to ponder her panic attack and come up with a way to explain it to Andi—to Joe. It also gave her three sleepless nights to contemplate one inescapable truth: Gavin Spencer had triggered something in her. Whether it was Gavin himself or some characteristic of his, she had no way of knowing, but something about him had shaken her.

Lila ran through a thousand iterations of what she would say, but every version collapsed beneath a tiny voice that whispered: What if? What if Gavin had something to do with her attack? It was absurd on its face, she knew that. Other than the GHB, nothing of what happened to her matched up with what Gavin did to Sadie. Besides that, he had been in Indiana that night.

Still, what if?

Those two small words created an enormous problem for Lila. No matter how inconceivable that what if remained, its mere existence could get her kicked off Gavin’s case. Andi would apply an overabundance of caution and lock Lila out for nothing more than a wisp in the wind. That seemed an injustice that bordered on cruelty. Andi needed her on that case. Lila understood the fog of Sadie’s amnesia, the mix of memory and imagination that might cause her to stumble in her testimony. No one was better suited to prep Sadie for trial than Lila.