Page 94 of I’ll Be Watching You

There was a heavy weight in his quiet voice.

“I’m sorry for your loss,” I said.

He nodded his thanks. “I was angry for a long time,” he went on. “Took a while to work through it. I was on the other side of it when Christina came in. She’d lost her fiancé. She was dealing with other stuff too, from before. But she was making progress. Drugs messed with that.”

“Recreational?” Jack asked.

“No, sir. Christina didn’t want to get high, she wanted to get better. Grief is slow. Ugly. But if you show up and do the work, you can come through it. She was doing that. My grief had been hot and angry. Her grief had been cold and sorrowful. But I understood her, and she was making progress. Then her VA shrink got her into some new PTSD drug trial. She jumped at it.”

He glanced down at his coffee, swirling it absently.

“We’ve read the investigative reports,” I said. “There was no indication drugs played a role in the crash.”

He looked up sharply. “Don’t care what the report says. I knew her. Before the drug, she was sad, sure, but she was present. She’d been accepted to the fire academy. She had experience and training. She was excited about the future. We had coffee every week. My wife and I had her over for barbecues. She brought her two oldest nephews a few times, good kids, close in age to my boys.”

He paused again, and this time the hurt showed.

“Then the meds,” he mumbled, cleared his throat. “First few days, she said it was like seeing the sunrise after being blind. I was skeptical, but happy for her. Then it changed. Her grief didn’t just come back, it swallowed her whole. It was different this time. Darker. Her cries sounded like torture.”

I shifted, uncomfortable with the image.

“She came over once after starting the meds,” Mike said quietly. “It was a bad night. She said things . . . well, some cruel things. Totally out of character. My wife was in tears afterward. I tried to reach out, but she stopped returning my calls.”

A long breath.

“A week later, she crashed.”

Silence settled over our table. I already had a picture of Christina, but hearing Mike’s calm, pain-filled words, her decline hit harder than I expected.

“Her doctor spoke to Rachel,” I said. “Did he ever contact you?”

“Yeah. I was one of her emergency contacts. He called. I told him what I thought of the drugs he gave her and hung up. Not my proudest moment, but far as I’m concerned, he legally killed my friend.”

Chapter Thirty-Two

Tess Angelhart

When Luisa and Nate walked into the den, they were arguing. Tess said, “Guys, shhh.” She pointed to the phone that was pressed to her ear.

Tess refocused on listening to the woman on the other end of the line. She continued to write rapidly on the pad in front of her. “Yes, uh-huh, okay, great. I appreciate all your help. Thank you.”

She ended the call and did a fist pump into the air. “Wow.”

“Who was that?” Luisa asked.

When Tess looked up, she noticed that Nate wasn’t in the room.

“Where’s Nate?”

“Doing what Nate does,” Luisa said with a dismissive wave of her hand. “What did you learn? Good news?”

“Maybe,” Tess said. “I made a connection. It might not mean anything, but it might mean everything.”

She took a deep breath. She was way too wired. She grabbed a water bottle out of the minifridge hidden in the bookshelf—under the hidden bar—and drank half of it.

“Lay it out,” Luisa said.

Tess went over to the whiteboard that Gabriel had set up for her. She wrote a name at the top of the board.