“We’ll find you a lawyer tomorrow,” he says.

I feel a twinge of hope. He’s saying “we” will find me a lawyer. That means he’s still on board. He’s not packing up my belongings and throwing them out the window.

“I didn’t kill her,” I say. “I swear to you.”

He doesn’t say anything.

“I didn’t. Do you honestly think I did?”

He shakes his head. “If you had asked me a few months ago, I would have said no. Definitely not. No way in hell. But now…”

“Sam!” Tears spring to my eyes. “You’re saying you think I’m a murderer? You really think I’d do that?”

He’s quiet for a moment. He rubs his face again. “No. I guess not.”

My shoulders sag with relief. He believes me. “I think I was framed, Sam. Apparently, someone sent an email that—”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“But you need to know that—”

“I don’t want to hear it right now.” His Adam’s apple bobs. “I just want to go home, okay? We’ll talk about it tomorrow.”

Silence fills the car. I don’t say another word. Even though Sam claims he believes me, I’m not so sure. At the very least, there’s doubt in his mind.

I always felt like Sam was a man who would stay by my side no matter what. Somehow, in eight short months, we’ve lost that.

Chapter 31

“These charges are absolutely ridiculous. What you need is a good lawyer.”

My mother, in stark contrast to my husband, is absolutely convinced of my innocence. So much so that she thinks if they do arrest me, the police will have a wrongful arrest lawsuit on their hands. My mother is very into lawsuits. Last year, she got a pants suit she didn’t like from Saks Fifth Avenue and she called her lawyer to see if she could sue. (The answer was no. But she was able to return it. It’s unclear why she didn’t do that in the first place.)

We’re sitting in the bistro a block away from my apartment building, where my mother is treating me to lunch. The place is packed from the lunch rush, but my mother slipped the hostess a bill of some denomination, and we got a table pretty quick. I’m glad for the low buzz of conversation in the restaurant, because I don’t want anyone to overhear what we’re saying.

“Sam already got me a lawyer,” I say.

“Oh, did he?” she snorts. In her eyes, Sam is still that twenty-six-year-old kid who backed into her mailbox with his clunky old Honda and knocked it over. I’ll never forget the crestfallen look on Sam’s face when he did that—it was as if he knew that single act had cemented her dislike of him forever.