Doubt (Caroline Auden #1) - C. E. Tobisman Page 0,118

For her uncle to be okay. For her father to be okay. To help save those she loved, would she give up . . . everything?

At Caroline’s long silence, Eddie nodded.

“Are you going to tell anyone?” he asked.

“No, though I suspect I’m not the only one watching who noticed what you were doing. But I won’t be the one to say it. We won today, so there was no harm in what you did. Not to anyone but you, anyway.”

Eddie winced at her words.

“I’m so sorry,” he said, his voice anguished. “I didn’t know what to do. I’ve been trying for so long.”

Caroline had no answer for him. No solace. She knew the well-pressed, easygoing face he showed to the world hid a lonely kid from a poor town who missed his mom. He’d faced a morally ambiguous conundrum and had weighed it so that love came out on top. His own love, to be sure, but still love.

“I figured we couldn’t win without Annie anyway, so I figured it wouldn’t harm anything . . .” He trailed off. Caroline could see his words sounded weak even to him.

“I understand,” she said, “but I’ve got to go now.”

She needed to escape Eddie’s need for an absolution she could not give.

“Can I call you?” he called after her retreating form.

Caroline turned around to meet his eyes one last time.

“No. Not yet,” she said.

She turned away, tears springing to her eyes.

She walked quickly away from the courthouse steps. Away from Eddie. She’d watched him offer up her work in sacrifice to the enemy that had threatened her own family. She’d seen Eddie forget the stakes, the difference the case made for thousands of people like Jasper and his brother. In the end, Eddie had made a deal with those horrible people, just because they knew the right people at Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Information was power indeed, she thought bitterly.

Suddenly, Caroline stopped walking. Her eyes ceased to see the people around her. Her ears ceased to hear any sounds. Everything she thought she knew shifted, as if she had only just figured out she’d been looking through the wrong end of a telescope.

“Oh my God,” she said to no one.

CHAPTER 19

Caroline stood at the threshold of Louis’s office. The early-morning light painted the office buildings in his windows pastel shades. A distant hum of cars on the street far below reverberated softly around the space.

When Louis looked up, his face broke into an uncharacteristically broad grin.

“Ah, the remarkable Ms. Auden darkens my doorstep. I was beginning to think you’d never come back.” He chuckled. “I assume you took a couple days off to sort yourself out after a long and stressful week. Well deserved, indeed. I hope you’re ready to come back to work hard. I’ve got another case ready to go, if you’re up for it.”

Instead of answering, Caroline held out an envelope.

Louis raised an eyebrow.

“My resignation,” Caroline said.

Louis took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. Then he replaced them and met her eyes, his own filled with sorrow.

“Why, may I ask, are you quitting?” he asked.

“I can’t work for a fixer,” she said.

Louis stayed silent.

“It was you, wasn’t it?” Caroline held up a hand. “No, don’t answer. You’ll deny it. But I know it’s true. You told me once that you can set a person up to succeed or to fail. Looking back, I can see you set me up to fail.”

When Louis didn’t say anything, she continued, “At the beginning, I wondered why you’d staffed just one lawyer, a first-year associate who knew nothing about anything, on a huge case. But then, my ego liked thinking you trusted me to handle it. Like I was so great or something . . .”

She shook her head at her hubris. “But that wasn’t why you put me on the case. You put me on SuperSoy to fail. It was just another way to sabotage the case. In case the hole you’d made in the evidence didn’t kill it.”

She paused, her eyes settling on a photograph on Louis’s wall of a building that looked like an overwrought birthday cake perched atop a hill overlooking the ocean. Beachgoers populated the foreground, their peaked caps and bloomers exotic in their old-fashioned formality. Though the image was black-and-white, the reflections on the wet sand suggested a sunny day . . . a sunny day of people long since grown and dead.

“You weren’t surprised about that hole in the science,” she said, meeting Louis’s eyes again.