“About what?”

“You told us your father abused your mother,” Gorey said. “But you never said a word about the fact that you tried to kill your father.”

Time came to a screeching halt. I could only stare at him, my heart booming like a cannon in my ears. There was no point in belligerently asking what he meant. I couldn’t pretend to be innocent.

“I was protecting my mother,” I said. “She’d written a letter saying her husband was going to kill her. I found it by accident, and I . . .”

“You what?”

“I had to help her.” My voice came out in choked bursts. I’d grown up in a house where the shadow of violence always loomed. For as long as I could remember, it was a place where a casual slap could land on you for not moving quickly enough. The two years Reagan had mostly lived with us had been an oasis of calm, because my parents never behaved like that around other people. But when we were on our own, without eyes on us, our house felt like a feral place. When I was fifteen, things went badly at my father’s business, and our homelife really went downhill.

“You stabbed him with a steak knife,” Gorey said. “He had organ damage. He could’ve died.”

Stop being so dramatic, Caro had told me back then. This is just what they do. But I hadn’t taken her advice. The week I found the letter, our mother had been wearing a scarf around her neck every day, which was odd. One night, she slipped it off without thinking, and I caught sight of the necklace of bruises circling her pale throat. That was when I’d gone to the kitchen and disappeared a knife into an old tea towel. I told myself I’d act next time I heard them fighting in their bedroom. I hadn’t seen the worst of my father’s violence, but I’d heard it.

“He was drunk,” I said. “He was beating my mother.”

I remembered that night like it was a shaky amateur home movie. Maybe it was because I was so rattled when I entered my parents’ bedroom. Get out, my father had barked at me, but all his fury was directed at my mother. She had started to scream, and he shoved her back. Instead of arguing with him, I’d jabbed the knife into his side.

There was a long silence in the room. “Look, we understand you were in a horrible situation,” Villaverde said. “And I’m sorry you went through that. We both are.”

His words seemed to nudge his partner along. “No one should ever be in a situation like that,” Gorey muttered.

“I was fifteen.” The words embarrassed me as they hung in the air between us. Was I using my age as a defense? There was no way to explain to the cops that, in my family, letting outsiders in on our secrets was a crime far worse than violence. Aside from Caro, I had no one I could talk to. Stabbing my father had felt like my only option.

“We understand that. We see people all the time who take the law into their own hands. Some of them mean well, but I can tell you their situation never ends well.”

Gorey’s words were sharp. I couldn’t argue. My father had actually refused to call the police or go to the hospital the night I stabbed him. The next day, he’d been so ill he’d passed out with a raging fever. My aim with the knife hadn’t been very good, but he caught sepsis, and he ended up in the hospital for weeks.

My mother came to see me as much as she could at Creedmoor Psychiatric Center, where they’d locked me up to see how criminally insane I was. Why’d you do it, lamb? she’d asked me gently, in her lilting Irish accent. That was a terrible thing.

He was going to kill you, I’d told her. I found your letter.

What letter?

The one in the Bible.

She’d crossed herself at that. That wasn’t for you to read, lamb. I’m sorry you saw it.

I’m glad I did. He got what he deserved.

That’s not true. He needs help. I think we all do.

The memory was making my hands quiver. I clasped them together. “What happened with my father has nothing to do with Caro’s death.”

“It has everything to do with it,” Gorey said. “You think men who have bad relationships with their wife deserve to die.”

I had thoughts on his definition of bad relationships, but I kept them to myself. “I believe in justice.”

“But you’re out looking for vengeance,” Gorey said. “That’s not the same thing. I’m not going to pretend I understand what you’re going through right now, but you’re in dangerous territory.”

“I don’t understand what ancient family history has to do with this.”

“Aubrey Sutton-Braithwaite wants us to file charges against you for what you did to him yesterday,” Villaverde said. “We’ve tried to explain you’re under a lot of stress, and—”

“Aubrey?” I was incredulous. “He attacked me.”

“You’re sitting in front of us, and you look fine,” Gorey said. “Meanwhile, he’s got two fractured ribs and a concussion.”

“He deserved all of it,” I muttered darkly. I doubted that his injuries were really that bad. He was probably faking the head trauma.

“What was that?”

It was so tempting to give in to white-hot fury. I wanted to turn the table over, run out of there, hunt down Aubrey, and crack his skull like an egg. But the memory of my mother stopped me.

“Why don’t we call my lawyer?” I said. “His name is Hugo Laraya. He’s with Casper Peters McNally.”

“We know the name,” Gorey said. “You can’t afford someone like that.”

“Yet again, you are wrong,” I said. “Where’s your phone?”

CHAPTER 27

DEIRDRE

I’m not sure what I expected Theodore Thraxton’s high-powered lawyer to be like, but it sure wasn’t the guy who walked into the interview room. Hugo Laraya looked as if he’d been pulled from a Great Gatsby–themed game of lawn croquet. He was dressed in immaculate white from his pointy leather wingtips to his trilby hat. The detectives stared at him as if he were a storybook character who’d stepped off the page.

“Hi, I’m Deirdre,” I said.

“My favorite new client,” Laraya said with a smile.

“We were just—” Gorey started to say, but the lawyer put out one hand.

“I know what you were up to,” he said pointedly, staring them down. “I’ve already spoken to an outcry witness to whom Ms. Crawley here described her sexual assault by Aubrey Sutton-Braithwaite.”

I blushed at that. Thinking of myself as a victim made me about as comfortable as if fire ants were burrowing under my skin.

“Outcry witness?” Villaverde asked.

“Theodore Thraxton,” Laraya said. “The senior one, to be clear.” He took a seat next to me. “I spent all of ten minutes researching this Aubrey character, and do you know what I found? Multiple DUIs. A couple of assault charges. Plus, several accusations of sexual assault or rape. Yet here you are, treating one of his victims as if she were the criminal. What are you doing, gentlemen? Where are your heads?”

“Aubrey’s dad called the ADA,” Gorey said. “He sent over the hospital report. That’s how it got to us.”

“We knew Deirdre was in mourning for her sister. We wanted to help,” Villaverde added.

“Ah, so you were helping her by treating her like a perp,” Laraya said. “And you wonder why people don’t trust the police.” He glanced at me. “Let’s go, Deirdre.”

I was still stunned by what had happened. “I can go?”

“You’re not under arrest,” Laraya said. “You are most certainly free to go.”

Both cops wore the expressions of cartoon characters who’d been run over by a truck. We walked out of the room.

“Let’s get out of here before we have a proper chat,” Laraya said. “The walls have ears in places like this.”

We went out to Fifty-First Street and crossed Third Avenue. Half a block down was Greenacre Park. The name was a bit misleading—it was a fraction of an acre—but it was a green oasis. We sat on a concrete bench and watched the cascading waterfall at the north edge of the park in companionable silence for a minute.

“I don’t understand what just happened,” I said finally, after I felt calm enough. “Theodore Thraxton gave me your card. I never thought I’d use it. How did you know all that about Aubrey?”

“I did a quick search on the taxi ride down here,” Laraya said. “Mr. Thraxton called me, probably just after he spoke with you. He’s sort of a strange bird, but he has a tendency to take certain people under his wing.”

“It was hard to hear you call me a victim,” I said. “I knocked Aubrey on his ass, and he deserved it.”

“In the eyes of the law, it’s essential that you acted in self-defense. It doesn’t look kindly at vigilante justice.”

“What do I do now?”

“We need to talk about what happened yesterday,” Laraya said. “Then I’ll have a word with the ADA. We’ll file a police report about what happened to you . . .”

“But I don’t want . . .”