on the other foot, but that doesn’t mean I can’t be frustrated as well.
Grayson pulls on the collar of his shirt, suddenly hot. “You have a point.” He joins me at the rear of my car, his strides apprehensive. “What about the local detective you mentioned a few weeks back? Do you trust him?”
I make an iffy face. “I don’t know him well enough to trust him. Besides, my trust is at an all-time low right now.”
Grayson holds his hands up and steps back, hearing the scorn I didn’t articulate. He’s still in my shit book—very much so. If he hadn’t stuck his neck out to help me secure the files he did, we still wouldn’t be talking. That’s how annoyed I am that he kept all of this from me. I may have dropped the ball a handful of times back in the day, but once I proved my worth, he should have been honest.
Grayson watches me load the final box into the trunk of my BMW before asking, “What now?”
The tick of my jaw is heard in my reply, “We do exactly what Tobias taught us to do. Heads down—”
“Asses up,” Grayson fills in with a smile. “Then, when no one is looking, we conduct our own investigations on the sly.”
I smile for the first time in weeks. “Exactly.”
Even though I’m still angry at him, I return his man-hug when he ups the ante on our usual chin-lift farewell by wrapping his arms around my back, although I’m tempted to strangle him when he mutters in my ear, “Call your girl. Now is as good a time as any.”
I slap his back a little firmer than I usually do. “She’s not my girl anymore.” Before he can dispute my comment, I add, “And I’ve got a massive web to unravel first. I don’t want to give her half-assed facts. She deserves to know the truth.”
Incapable of denying my highly accurate statement, Grayson remains quiet, only speaking when I slip into the driver’s seat of my car. “Reach out if you need me.”
“Same to you.” I don’t know if he heard my comment or not. He disappeared into the darkness long before my eyes strayed to the side mirror.
17
Melody
“You can call him, you know?”
I stop peering down at the two-word text Brandon sent me a week ago to stray my eyes to Julian. He’s supposed to be making beef stir-fry for dinner. All he’s doing is making a mess. This is one of those times I hate his I-cook-you-clean rules.
After dumping my cell phone onto the coffee table, I join him in my compact kitchen. “And say what? I’m sorry your association with me when we were kids has you being accused of murder twice? Or that I’m not the cheating scumbag you think I am?”
His orange-tinged blond brow pops up high on his face. “You could say both, although I wouldn’t recommend those exact words.”
I bump him with my hip, steal an almond from the packet he’s sprinkling into the almost-cooked mix, then spin around to sign, “Smart-ass.”
The almond gets stuck halfway down my throat when Julian says, “I saw that.” He whacks my butt with a grubby wooden spoon. “Now I’ll add even more nuts to the mix.” After lowering my bottom lip into a pout, I pivot back around to face him. “Nu-huh.” He silently tsks me. “This is what happens when you lie. Your stir-fry gets extra nutty.”
Ignoring the flutter of my heart as it recalls the last time I ate a nut-riddled dish, I say, “I wasn’t lying. You are a smart-ass.”
Since he can’t deny the truth, he remains quiet.
After a few minutes of watching him in my kitchen like it’s as natural as breathing to him, I ask, “Do you think he knows?”
Julian’s eyes lift from the stir-fry with way too many nuts. “That they changed the ruling on your parents’ accident?” When I jerk up my chin, he adds, “I’d say so. His name was mentioned a few times in the new reports.” He places down his wooden spoon, lowers the gas flame from high to low, then props his hip onto the counter next to mine. “Have you decided what you want to do yet? You’re well within your rights to sue.”
“Sue who, exactly? The man who falsified the documents is dead.” He was the police chief of my hometown. He died during a routine traffic stop a few months after my parents’ accident.
“You could sue the state.”
I sigh. “Then I