Page 87 of The Silent Hour

Meg lifted an eyebrow. “Explain.”

“We don’t know she’s complicit in whatever he’s doing.”

Carmen nodded thoughtfully. “Fair.”

“She could be,” Toya pointed out.

“But until we have proof, she isn’t automatically his accomplice just because he’s her father.”

Toya puckered her lips. “Very mature.”

“I hate it too.”

Laughter rippled through us again.

“Here’s what we do know: Cortez deliberately implicated her, and he specifically wants her in this game.”

“Exactly,” Carmen said, tapping the table. “That means something. Maybe she’s useful. Maybe he’s controlling her. Maybe he’s using her to get to Ethan. Or maybe he’s just fucking with everyone.”

“Or she knows more than she’s saying,” Meg added.

My Tato had taught me you gathered every piece of information you could, then you decided what it meant.

"So we keep digging,” Meg said, on the same page as me. “Quietly,”

"And nobody does anything reckless."

Toya looked offended. "Why did you look directly at me?"

“Because you’d be the number one contender to do so.”

I sat back. The plan forming in my head wasn't revenge. Not yet, anyway. It was information. I wanted to know why Dominic Cortez had chosen my husband and why he'd dragged Lila into it. And yes, I wanted to know more about Lila.

Not because she’d kissed Ethan, that was a personal wound, raw and private, that I would tend to alone in the dark hours when the house was quiet. I wanted to know who she was because Dominic Cortez had deliberately placed her on the board, a piece moved into position against my husband.

Those were different investigations. One of the heart, one of survival—and they needed to stay separate, like fire and gasoline.

As for my marriage? That stayed between Ethan and me, in the space where his shirts still hung beside mine in the closet, where his toothbrush stood damp in the holder. I wasn’t going to monitor him like a prisoner, checking his phone for unfamiliar numbers or tracing his routes through the city.

I wasn’t going to interrogate every late night or press my face into the collar of his dress shirts searching for traces of another woman’s perfume to be sure I wasn’t imagining things if I ever smelled it clinging to him. If things ever got to that point, this marriage was already over.

He’d fucked up. Badly. The memory of his confession still sat like a weight in my stomach, but one bad decision wasn’t eleven years of marriage—yet. What came next mattered more than what had already passed. Maybe trusting Ethan made me brave. Maybe it made me stupid—the kind that believes in second chances or the benefit of doubt even when every instinct screams to build higher walls.

Time would decide and in the meantime, trust didn’t require blindness. Neither would I. I could love my husband, trust my husband, stand beside my husband in our kitchen at midnight, and still make sure that if the ground ever disappeared beneath my feet, because of his choices, that I already knew where I was going to land.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

ETHAN

BY EIGHT, THE FIRM had gone quiet, the kind of silence that came when everyone barricaded themselves inside their offices and disappeared beneath motions, discovery, and enough caffeine to qualify as a controlled substance.

My office was no different. Drafts were stacked in towers across my desk, filings spread between them, and the whiteboard had become a mess of timelines, names, and arrows looping back on themselves.

Eric was stretched out in the chair across from me, tie loose, pen tapping against his knee. He wasn't working so much as watching me work, which, irritatingly, was sometimes how he worked best.

"Cortez buried us," I muttered, flipping another page. "Every filing is designed to choke time. Does this asshole want us to represent him or to bury us?"

Eric leaned forward. "You want my read? This whole mess isn't about the motions. It's about the people. Those shells we found have too many hands in the same pot. Every time we pull one thread, three more people show up attached to it."