Confessions Bundle. Jo Leigh

trailed off.

      And then there they were, with half a drink apiece, and nothing left to say.

      Had Lucy been close, he would’ve motioned for the check. She was across the room, her back to them as she waited on a group of guys in another booth.

      “I was wrong.”

      He considered pretending that he hadn’t heard Juliet speak. He looked at her through half-lowered lids, instead, saying nothing. But listening.

      Not because he believed she had anything to say that he wanted to hear. Or because there was anything she could ever say that would make him okay with what she’d done.

      Perhaps what he felt was morbid curiosity. Or maybe just the simple fact that anything was preferable to being alone the evening before he took the stand in his own defense.

      She toyed with the stem of her wineglass, her eyes focused somewhere between it and the table.

      “I didn’t figure it all out until just recently,” she said. He couldn’t tell if she was talking to him or just taking out loud to herself. Somehow that made him pay more attention. “I had this conversation with Marcie…”

      She looked over at him. “She lied to me.”

      “Must run in the family.” Blake regretted the words as soon as they were said. Not because she didn’t deserve them, but because they were beneath him. He’d never deliberately hurt another individual in his life.

      “I told you my mother committed suicide,” she said, her eyes narrowed and tired-looking as she peered at him through the dim lighting. “What I didn’t mention was that I was the one who found her.”

      Shit. She’d been what? Twenty-three? Four?

      “I came home to help her get ready for a surprise birthday dinner in the city. I’d brought a new outfit for her to wear—a silk dress just like she’d worn when she was married to my father. I even had pumps to match…”

      Blake swirled the whiskey in his glass. She didn’t have to tell him this. He didn’t need to hear.

      “She was lying faceup in the tub. She’d only been in there a couple of hours, but already her skin was gray, her body bloated and wrinkled.”

      He wanted to down the rest of his glass and order another. He couldn’t make himself lift it to his lips. Couldn’t be that present in the moment.

      “I called 911, and then got obsessed with the idea that she’d be mortified if perfect strangers came in and saw her naked. She’d want to be seen in that new dress…”

      He was still watching her. Couldn’t pull his gaze away from hers, even when her eyes filled with tears.

      “So I hauled her out, dried her as quickly as I could, struggled with underwear. And panty hose…”

      Juliet’s voice trailed off and Blake breathed a sigh of relief that she was done. Even though he knew she wasn’t. He waited.

      “I had her completely dressed, shoes and all, by the time they got there.”

      She shook her head and smiled, as though trying to pretend that she hadn’t just been talking about dressing her dead mother’s naked body.

      “You should never have had to go through that.” He hadn’t meant to comment. “Especially not alone.”

      With a half shrug, Juliet picked up her glass, swallowed the remainder of the contents.

      “Yeah, well, the thing is, I thought I’d dealt with all of that. I went to counseling. I understood the phases of grief. I went through them and got on with my life.”

      He wanted to hold her in his arms. Just for a second.

      “I learned from the experience, used it to catapult me to success. My mother got pregnant just before she was due to start college. She gave it all up to get married and have Marce and me. I wasn’t going to do the same. I was going to make her sacrifice worthwhile by not repeating the same mistake.”

      No. He wasn’t going to let her make sense. Wasn’t going to understand. Her choice had cost him too much.

      “But you know what?” She looked as innocently lost as their daughter had that day he’d found her huddled behind a boulder on the beach.

      “What?”

      “I wasn’t over it at all. Instead of learning from my mother’s life, from her choices, I let her death rule me.”

      Eyes narrowed, Blake sipped his drink, and motioned to Lucy for two more. “How so?”

      “When I first found out about Mary Jane, when I first knew that I was pregnant, what I wanted more than anything was to tell you.”

      He might have thought she was lying, but she didn’t seem to care whether he believed her or not. She was telling him what she knew without any apparent interest in his response. She was confessing, not convincing.

      “I wanted to believe in the fairy tales and magic my mother had always talked about. The stuff she’d read from those storybooks from the time we were toddlers.”

      She stopped as Lucy brought their drinks, and then, without touching hers, continued.

      “I let my fear of being too much like her, my fear of making the same wrong decision, my fear of believing in love at first sight distract me from the truth.”

      It made perfect sense. But so much had happened between then and now. So much had changed.

      “There wouldn’t have been a way for you to contact me,” he heard himself saying. The pain of losing so many years of Mary Jane’s life had been easier to bear when he could blame it all on her. “When I first left, even my father didn’t know how to reach me.”

      There was always later, though.

      “Would you have come back if you’d known?”

      And that was the million-dollar question. Blake would like to believe, unequivocally, that he would have.

      He just wasn’t sure.

      “And what about five years ago? You were married to an unhappy wife, disoriented yourself, thankful that you didn’t have children.”

      Mary Jane would have been three. Still a toddler. Too young to remember that he hadn’t been around from the beginning.

      “I would’ve taken responsibility.” He meant what he said.

      But how could he have managed that? As she’d already said, he’d had an unhappy wife. He’d been filled with guilt and grief. Disoriented.

      She nodded. Stood.

      “See you tomorrow,” she said, and walked out, leaving him there with her untouched drink.

      CHAPTER TWENTY

      THE DEFENSE SPENT a week bringing in witnesses who testified to the character of the defendant. Employees, clients, even friends from Egypt. Juliet built a solid picture for the jury, a picture of a man incapable of defrauding anyone. A man who’d spent his time in the Cayman Islands living like the young married and financially modest man he was, not a man in possession of more than a million dollars. A man who was on the Islands only occasionally in between volunteering for weeks at a time in third world countries. Eaton James had sent money to help feed homeless children. Blake Ramsden taught them to feed themselves.

      And still, the jury looked doubtful.

      “It’s that damn bank account,” she told Duane late on the third Thursday in August. The trial had been going on for almost four weeks. If she didn’t win them over soon, Blake Ramsden was going to prison.

      “What I know,” Duane said, lounging back in the chair across from her desk, “is that I’ve never seen you so emotionally involved in a case.”

      She didn’t