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“And then, sir, I heard Jason. And he wasn’t calm. He was terrified. He yelled—shouted: ‘Maya, look what you did! You’re hurting her!’ Then he yelled it again. ‘Maya, get away from her!’”
My mind stopped.
“And then,” Henderson said, his voice barely above a whisper, “I heard him yell, ‘Give me the phone. I have to call 911.’”
He let the words hang in the air between us.
I couldn’t speak. I just stood there, frozen. This was impossible. Maya was the victim. Jason was the monster. I saw the scratches.
“Sir,” Henderson continued, “that was maybe thirty seconds before the big fall. I heard the scuffle. Then I heard the sound a body makes… a heavy, awful sound at the bottom of the stairs. And the only person I heard screaming ‘He pushed her!’ was your daughter. After it was all over.”
I must have staggered, because Henderson reached out to steady me.
“That’s… that’s not what my daughter said,” I whispered, the world tilting under my feet.
“I know, sir,” Henderson said, his face etched with a sad, hard pity. “That’s why I’m talking to you. I’m just an old soldier, and I’ve seen friendly fire before. I’ve seen people get confused in the fog of war. But I also know when someone is lying to cover their flank.”
He looked me square in the eye.
I drove away from my daughter’s house, but I couldn’t go back to the hospital. Not yet. I parked on a quiet side street. The little overnight bag sat on the passenger seat, mocking me with its simple, domestic purpose.
Henderson’s words were poison. They had seeped into my bloodstream and were now working their way toward my heart.
I think you are protecting the wrong person.
It was nonsense. It had to be. My daughter was a victim. I’d held her while she sobbed. My wife was a victim. I’d seen her lying in a pool of her own blood.
But my mind kept circling back. The detective. The juvenile record. Henderson’s certainty.
Maya, stop. You’re hurting her. Give me the phone. I have to call 911.
Why would he lie?
Check her laptop. Check Maya’s laptop.
At the time, I’d dismissed it as the frantic raving of a guilty man. A pathetic attempt to shift blame and muddy the water.
But what if it wasn’t?
What if it was the only true thing said that day?
I felt a deep, bone-level sickness. I’d been a city planner for forty-two years. My job was to see the foundation beneath the façade. I dealt in facts and blueprints. My entire life was built on looking at the structure of things.
And right now, the foundation of my family was cracking.
My heart was telling me one thing. My gut was telling me another.
My gut was telling me I was a seventy-one-year-old fool who had been staring at the wrong blueprint all along.
I couldn’t go back to that hospital until I knew. I needed facts.
The next morning, I drove downtown. I didn’t go to our old family lawyer. I couldn’t. I went to someone new—a name a colleague from the planning commission had given me years ago.
Angela Russo.
She had a reputation for being a shark in a silk blouse. She didn’t deal in sentiment. She dealt in assets, fraud, and cold, hard truth.
I needed that.
I walked into her sharp, modern office. I must have looked like what I was—a grieving, broken old man.
“Ms. Russo,” I said, my voice steadier than I felt. “My son-in-law was just arrested for the attempted murder of my wife. My daughter Maya is the primary witness. She’s a wreck.”
I paused, letting the lie settle.
“With her husband in jail and her mother in a coma, she’s… she’s not capable of handling her affairs. She needs help. I need you to protect her. I need you to get a clear picture of her finances, to secure her assets. Her husband was a gambler. I need to know how bad the damage is.”
It was the perfect cover—a concerned father protecting his traumatized daughter’s estate.
Angela just nodded, eyes sharp and analytical. “I’ll need your daughter to sign a power of attorney giving us temporary access to her financial records and personal devices.”
“She’ll sign anything I put in front of her right now,” I said.
And she did.
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