“I’ve taken what little time off I have from my job to travel here because this is so important to me,” she said. “I need to do this if I’m gonna make progress in my treatment.”
“It’s Katie’s progress I care about.”
“And well you should. That’s why I’m so happy she’s with you. You’re givin’ her the love and care I wasn’t capable of while I was sick.”
His brow furrowed. He knew depression was an illness, but he couldn’t help but feel she was trying to manipulate him by phrasing things that way.
In the end, she had pled her case for a few more minutes until he made a decision. He didn’t want to live with the possibility of Carol Ann showing up whenever she felt like it. By having this one conversation with her, he could get her out of his and Katie’s lives again.
“Where are you staying?” he had asked. “I can leave in a few hours to meet you.”
“I’m at my cousin’s house just outside Trenton, but I wouldn’t expect you to take that much time outta your day. It’d be four hours just for drive time back and forth. I’m happy to come out by you.”
“Fine. There’s a coffee shop down the road. We can meet there.”
After hanging up the phone, Will had tossed it to the side and leaned back against the sofa cushions, reaching up to run his hands over his face. Had he done the right thing by agreeing to this meeting? Or was he making a huge mistake?
He needed to talk to his dad.
“I thought you’d be dead to the world by now,” his dad had greeted him over the phone.
“Carol Ann called.”
There’d been a noticeable pause before his dad asked, “Did you call Sharon?”
Sharon Boaz was Will’s family law attorney. “No, I called you. She just wanted—”
“I don’t give a damn what she wanted. You need to call Sharon. I’m wrapping up with the inspector now. I’ll get Julio on my next appointment. I’ll be home in thirty or forty minutes.”
“Thanks.”
The phone went dead. Will looked over when Ryan approached.
“I think you should meet with her here,” Ryan said without preamble.
Of course the specialist had been listening. It wasn’t like Will had tried to keep the conversation private. Ryan’s comment still felt invasive.
“I don’t want her in our home.”
Ryan sat on the arm of the easy chair facing him. “That’s understandable. But here, we control the environment. We can install cameras and microphones so if anything you say is ever called into question, you’ll have the truth on record.”
“Isn’t that illegal?”
“There are ways to make her aware of recording devices without putting her guard up, which is key in situations like these.” When Will didn’t respond, he said, “You should know Ordinem conducted a standard run on Ms. Wilkins at the onset of my service to you. She was telling the truth about the depression. She’s been receiving treatment for nearly a year.”
Will had pondered that. “That must’ve been why the depression wasn’t mentioned during the legal proceedings. She didn’t know about it.”
“That seems to be the case. Ms. Wilkins hired a friend for her legal representation, one who had only recently passed the bar exam. If she had hired someone with more experience who didn’t know her so well, they would likely have insisted on a court-ordered psych eval based on her atypical behavior.”
Will supposed it made him a terrible person to be glad about that. Things would have been much more entangled if Carol Ann had known she was sick. Instead, she did everything she could to push full custody to him.
“She just wants to tell me her side of things,” he said, still not comfortable with secretly recording their meeting.
Ryan had folded his hands and rested them on his thigh in a way that read, Okay, let’s try this another way.
“In the course of my investigation into Ms. Wilkins, I also learned that Katie isn’t her only child.”
“What?”
“Ms. Wilkins grew up near the Single-A stadium where you two first met. She started hanging around the ballplayers who played there when she was fourteen. She got pregnant the first time at fifteen. She received money for the baby in a private adoption.”
“How did I not hear about this before now?”
“The adoption was closed, meaning the records were sealed. It would have taken more than a basic search to uncover it, and from what I understand, your petition for custody was