“DO YOU BELIEVE HER?” BRENNAN ASKED. THE BRIEFCASE rested on the coffee table between them. Brennan slouched in one of the wingback chairs now that Nicki had left.
Hunter shrugged. “She wasn’t lying. Did he lie to her?”
“About fighting with Jessica? About wanting to kill her?”
Brennan buried her face in her hands. Her shoulders shook. Jessica waited for her father. To get there, to be there for her. She’d just needed him to help her. To love her.
Hunter came around the coffee table and knelt on the floor beside her. Brennan picked her head up.
“Why did she stay after he left?” she asked.
“I don’t know.”
Brennan knew. Jessica thought he’d come back. Brennan imagined her, watching the door, hoping he’d calm down once he had a moment outside the apartment, waiting for him to return, to make things right.
Hunter took her hand, but she couldn’t look at his face. It was too much like her father’s. “Bren, he didn’t…it wasn’t him.”
He was right. Someone else had knocked on the door. Brennan could see it—Jessica jumping up, elated he’d returned. Would it have felt any different for her if her father knocked on the door at that moment? Jessica opened the door, but it hadn’t been her father.
Brennan knew she almost had it figured out, who it had been on the other side of the door, but she couldn’t get past the defeat Jessica would have felt that her father hadn’t come back.
How long had it taken, before she’d been stabbed? Had Jessica looked back to the door, hoping her father would walk in and save her? In the photos, her head was turned toward the couch, but it hadn’t been the couch she’d been facing. Jessica would have been able to see the bottom of the door through the space beneath the couch. How long had she been able to see, waiting for the door to open, for her father to come back and save her?
“He left her there. Waiting.”
“He came back.”
Brennan shook her head. “He may as well have killed her.”
Hunter said, “Based on the pathologist’s report, Bren, she was already dead. Even if she wasn’t, he couldn’t have saved her anyway.”
“Does it make a difference?” She finally faced Hunter. All of that waiting. For nothing. He was never coming back. “He didn’t even try! You were right!”
“No,” Hunter said. “We were both wrong.”