Chapter 5: My Second Life
“I said pay her,” Julian whispered. “I said pay her whatever she wanted. I said make it go away.”
“And we did,” Sienna said.
The room had gone so quiet I could hear the projector fan still running in the booth.
Julian looked at me. Not at Grace Doyle in green satin. At me. Whatever he saw in my face, he believed it, because his knees went out from under him and he sat down hard on the edge of the stage like a little boy.
Detective Alvarez put Sienna in handcuffs in front of four hundred people and a slideshow of my life.
It came out the way truth does once the first piece falls. In order, and all at once.
Victor Kane’s phone records put him two blocks from my apartment the night I died. His car’s GPS put him on Ponce de Leon Avenue forty minutes later, three cars behind Grace’s Honda. He’d kept the original dashcam card in a gun safe in his basement as insurance. When Alvarez showed him the copy, he asked for a lawyer and then, a week later, a deal.
He told them everything. That Sienna had called him the night I told Julian I’d recant. That she’d said, “Julian wants it handled. You know what that means.” That Victor had decided he did.
Sienna Vale was charged with vehicular homicide for Daniel Brooks, and conspiracy to commit murder for me. Victor Kane pleaded guilty to my murder and the attempted murder of Grace Doyle. He’ll never leave prison.
Julian was never charged with my murder. The texts were real. Pay her whatever she wants. Make it go away. He hadn’t asked anyone to kill me.
But he had asked me to lie under oath, and he’d covered up a death, and he’d stood in front of cameras and called me a terrible mistake. He pleaded guilty to obstruction of justice and leaving the scene of a fatal accident. Three years. The Olympic housing contract went to someone else. The Ashford name came off two buildings in Buckhead by spring.
He asked to see Grace Doyle before he went in.
We met in a small room at the county jail. He looked like a photograph of himself that had been left in the sun.
“I know how this sounds,” he said. “I know it’s impossible. But I need to ask. Is it you?”
I looked at him for a long time. The man I would have died for. The man I did die for.
“Claire is gone,” I said. “She took the blame for you. She took a lot of things for you. She died thinking that was love.”
His face crumpled.
“But she wanted you to know something,” I said. “She doesn’t forgive you. And she doesn’t have to.”
I left him there. I didn’t look back. That was the first thing I ever did just for me.
Daniel Brooks’s case was reopened, and my guilty plea was vacated, which is a strange thing to read about yourself in the newspaper. Amanda Brooks called the law firm, looking for “the paralegal who found the card.” When we met, she held my hand across a diner table and said, “Thank you for not letting it go.” Her little boy colored a picture of a bike for me. It’s on Grace’s refrigerator.
My refrigerator.
I’ve stopped trying to explain what happened to me. I don’t think there’s an explanation that would fit inside a sentence. I only know Grace Doyle spent the last days of her life trying to save a stranger, and somehow, the stranger got to live.
So I’m living. Carefully. Gratefully. In her name.
I call Linda every Sunday. She says I’ve gotten better at cooking since the accident. I enrolled in night law school at Georgia State, because Grace’s notebook had a page that just said LSAT in March??? with three question marks, and I figured she’d earned an answer.
On the morning of my first exam, I stood in front of the bathroom mirror in my black blazer. The woman in the glass looked back at me. Dark bangs. Gray-blue eyes. Steady.
She doesn’t feel like a stranger anymore.
“Okay, Grace,” I told her. “Let’s go.”
