Page 47 of Thicker Than Water
“Of course he will. Why would you say that?”
As her lips curl inward, sealing her answer inside her mouth, I shake her hand again, harder this time. “Hey, don’t do that,” I say. “Talkto me.”
She drags her gaze to Jason, and as she watches him over my shoulder, her eyes swim with fear, as if it’s not her husband she’s seeing, but a ghost.
“Lou can’t make this go away,” she says. “Maybe at a trial, maybe he can make a case for reasonable doubt—”
“Reasonable doubt? He can do a hell of a lot better than that. But this won’t even go to trial, he’ll figure it out, he’ll—”
“How?” Julia asks. “Gavin’s blood was on Jason’s knife. Jason had his phone. He was in the area at the time of the murder. The evidence is there.”
“Yeah, but—there’s got to be some other explanation.”
“Even if there is,” Julia says—and I flinch at thatif, “the doctor said she thinks Jason will wake up soon. Tomorrow, maybe! This won’t be fixed before then. He’s going to be arrested for Gavin’s murder.”
“No.”
Flames lick my stomach as I think of those handcuffs, see them snapping around my brother’s wrists before Beck hauls him to a jail cell.
“We’ll figure it out,” I tell Julia. I drop from a crouch to a kneel, tightening my grip on her hand. “Before Jason wakes up. We’ll spend all day on it. We won’t sleep, we won’t stop, not until we find out what happened to Gavin. We still have those names from the warehouse. I know we got sidetracked by Maeve yesterday, but that cash is still a lead, and we know Jason’s innocent; we know he is!”
“I don’t think we know anything anymore.”
The sentence, quiet as it is, knocks me back on my heels.
“What?” My voice is barely more than a whisper. “What are you saying?”
Julia tucks her chin toward her chest, eyes scurrying across the blank tiles on the floor.
“What are you saying?” I repeat, firmer this time. “You think he did it?”
She shakes her head quickly, as if to say,No, of course not. But the gesture doesn’t look like denial. It looks like defeat.
“I don’t know,” Julia says.
“You… don’t know?”
“I just— I can’t—” Julia heaves in a breath. “How else do you explain everything?”
I almost laugh. “Um, you explain it literally any other way than by believing Jason killed a man.”
Julia shakes her head again, confusion stamped onto her face. “I guess. But… it’s not just the blood or the phone, is it? There’s also that paper from Jason’s pocket, the one with Gavin’s address on it. It’s all— When you put it all together, the picture is pretty damning.”
“But there’szeromotive. Jason had no reason to want Gavin dead.”
“We don’t know that. There’s so much we don’t know. He lied to me. Over and over. He lied about the money he took from our account. He cheated on me with Maeve. And no, Ineverwould have thought that Jason could commit murder, but I never thought he’d do those other things either. I don’t think I really know him, Sienna. I don’t think either of us do.”
I gape at her, blown back. One moment she was reluctant to speak, and now her words feel like matches struck against my bones.
“I know him,” I manage.
Because even though she’s right about parts of it—he lied, he cheated—there’s a world of difference between adultery and murder, a distance too huge for Jason to cross.
“He’s my brother, myblood,” I add. “I fucking know him. And yes, he’s made some terrible mistakes, but he isn’t violent. He doesn’thurtpeople. He helps them.”
For the millionth time in my life, the memory whirs into motion, a film strip flickering on: Jason, at that high school party, freeing me from Clive Clayton’s grasp, saving me from the threat of violence—Shh, just relax—that Clive had hissed into my ear.
“That’s what we thought about Aiden,” Julia says. “But he pushed that kid.”
