The Night Before We Got Married novel · Chapter 16 of 24
Chapter 16: The Recant
The eggs burned while we stood there.
Briggs didn't seem to notice. He turned off the TV and stood looking at the black screen.
"Pending an internal review," he said. "Conduct unbecoming. Relationship with a witness."
"I'm not a witness. I'm the victim. What happens to the case?"
"The foundation's lawyers are already saying the readout was tampered with. They'll say I put a jealous Holcombe in front of a laptop and let him type whatever he wanted."
"He read it in front of a detective."
"He read it in my kitchen, with my girlfriend at the table." He stopped. "Sorry. I don't know what to call you."
"Girlfriend's fine."
He looked at me then, finally, and some of the gray went out of his face.
"Okay," he said. "Girlfriend's fine."
Briggs's mother dropped Birdie at the curb at four that afternoon.
Birdie came in the door and didn't take off her shoes. She walked straight past both of us and up the stairs.
Her bedroom door shut.
Briggs's phone buzzed. His mother, calling from the car.
He listened and closed his eyes.
"A boy at school said her daddy was on the news for being bad," he told me. "She hit him with her lunchbox."
"I'll go," I said.
Birdie was face down on her bed with her sneakers still lit up, blinking red against the wall.
I sat on the floor with my back to the bed.
"Go away," she said into the pillow.
"I can't. I'm doing research."
"For what?"
"There's a scene in my play where a girl gets very, very upset. And I don't know how to do it. I thought maybe you could show me."
She turned her head.
"You can cry on purpose. You did it at the diner."
"Crying's easy. I need to know how you do the stomping."
"I didn't stomp."
"You stomped up every single stair. I counted. Fourteen."
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