more perkily than he would have guessed. “That consolidates things. We’re only in a chase with one guilty party. It’s nice to have a bright side.”
She was the only bright side he needed. The days in prison had been long, and the nights had been even longer. He’d known that much—but he hadn’t realized how narrow and dark his life had been before that, too. He hadn’t realized how long he’d really been lonely.
All his life—until her.
So as long as she was on his side, he didn’t know that he even cared about anything else. He could give up his freedom for her without even thinking about it. It wasn’t even about trading a sure-thing escape for an uncertain exoneration, it was about knowing that Gretchen Miller had found him to be somebody worth trusting. Gretchen, who could afford to pick and choose the people she cared about, had chosen him, even when there were a thousand reasons not to. She’d trusted him—she’d shaken his hand and taken his chains off.
Nothing else mattered even half as much as that.
But if there was some hope of being exonerated, however faint, he had to try for it.
I could live a whole life with her.
That was a fantasy. He might never get out. She might already like Keith, or she might already be dating someone he knew nothing about. But at least for right now, he could let himself dream. It would be a little sweetness to cut through all the darkness they were dealing with.
“I like a bright side too,” Cooper said, letting himself look at her for just a second too long. He hoped she didn’t notice.
“So we have a long car ride to solve a mystery,” Gretchen said, still sounding purposefully upbeat. Cooper figured that meant that she was as worried about the gathering clouds as he was. “We’ll be like Nero Wolfe—some great detective who doesn’t even have to leave his house to solve a murder.”
“Brilliant traveling detectives,” Cooper agreed. “That’s us.”
“Only...” She trailed off.
“Only you don’t know where to start?”
“Not a clue. You?”
He shook his head. “I’ve been thinking it over for six months, and I haven’t gotten anywhere. The only people who would have normally been able to access the leaked files were me and Phil, and I know it wasn’t me—”
“I know that too,” Gretchen said.
Cooper couldn’t keep himself from smiling. He’d never get tired of hearing that she believed him. “And I don’t see how it could have been Phil. People who want to commit crimes and want to cover them up do a lot of things, but they don’t kill themselves and then hide the gun in someone else’s house. It’s a bridge too far.”
Thinking about Phil’s death definitely wiped the smile off his face.
“I’m sorry,” Gretchen said, glancing over at him. “I hadn’t really gotten to the part in my head where since you didn’t kill your friend, you lost him, instead. It must have been pretty hard to try to grieve him with everything else going on.”
“It was, but...”
He had never told anybody the full story of his last few days with Phil. He’d started to tell his lawyer, but the guy had cut him off and warned him not to say anything that could make him look worse than he already did. Stories about arguing with the murder victim definitely qualified.
If he told Gretchen, there was a chance he would look over at her and see her trust in him, which he valued more than anything else, vanish right before his eyes.
For a second the words stuck in his throat.
He couldn’t stand the thought of her turning away from him.
But if he didn’t tell her the truth, he wouldn’t deserve her trust, and he knew it. He had to be worthy of her even if it killed him.
“I don’t know if this makes sense or not, but I didn’t grieve him as much as I would have wanted to. I wish we’d been closer. We didn’t always see eye-to-eye. Phil wasn’t even really talking to me when...”
Gretchen was right. What grief he’d had was still unresolved and messy. He had to choke down a lot of tangled feelings to keep going.
“When he died,” he finished.
She didn’t stiffen up or lean away from him. Her voice was still warm when she said, “What happened?”
“We were getting a new witness settled in. I’ll never see her again, I know that—they must have moved her all the way across the country after I got