Page 105 of Heartsick & Lipsticks
Jada shook her head as she set my phone down on my desk. “I spoke to Gary and explained the situation. She’s been asleep all afternoon. I told him to let me know when she woke up, and he hasn’t messaged.”
“Okay, please tell him that I want to be the one to tell her when I get home. So if at all possible, make sure she doesn’t see any of this.”
She nodded and began typing on her phone. I read through the articles, and whoever their source was, they did have the basic information correct, which was more than I could say for a lot of articles that were written.
I wondered if my email had been hacked somehow. I’d gotten reports from both Maddox and the private investigator last week that outlined some of the details in the stories.
Naomi was underage, only sixteen when she met Samuel Locke, who was twenty-four at the time and a police officer. She married him two days after she turned eighteen; she was already four months pregnant. Four months after their wedding, he was fatally shot. She was sentenced to life in prison and was recently paroled on compassionate release.
What the papers didn’t say was that in the few months between her wedding night and the night she was arrested, she’d had to go to the emergency room three times. Her intake papers at the jail revealed she had two broken ribs, a fractured jaw, a black eye, and bruising on her neck consistent with strangulation.
Those details weren’t in the papers, but I knew them. I knew the horror my mother had lived through and how badly the system had failed her. I couldn’t help but feel like I’d failed her. Not only for the past twenty-two years that I’d abandoned her in that prison, but now.
I didn’t know how, but I would protect her from this. I would not allow the media to make a circus out of the little time she had left.
