He Defended My Mother's Killer, Now He Pays with His Life novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: His Birthday
Victoria hides in Brice's closet with a birthday cake and hears her best friend in his bed and Brice admitting he got her mother's killer off. She steps out, leaves, and meets a detective in the lobby who calls Brice his brother.
I carried a lemon cake across an ocean for fifteen hours, and I was still holding it when the lock on Brice's bedroom door turned.
I had a spare key and the lobby code.
He did not know I was in the country.
I had baked the cake in my Sydney kitchen at four in the morning, because lemon with browned butter was his favorite.
Then I had hidden in his walk-in closet, behind his winter coats, to jump out when he came home.
It was his thirty-fourth birthday.
Tierney had texted me the night before. Don't worry about him, I'm feeding him, he's fine.
She had been my best friend since the freshman dorm.
She was the one who introduced us.
I heard the bedroom door open and two people come in.
I smiled in the dark and counted to three.
Then a woman laughed, low and breathless, and Brice said her name.
"Tierney."
I stopped counting.
"Shut the door," Tierney whispered. "The hallway can hear us."
"Nobody's coming," Brice said, gently. "Victoria is twenty hours away, asleep in Sydney. Let her sleep. She works so hard."
The bed took their weight.
I stood behind his coats and held the cake against my chest.
I heard the zipper of a dress, and Tierney moaning his name, and the headboard knocking the wall.
I wanted to be sick.
I wanted to walk out and hurl the cake at him.
I took out my phone and thumbed the voice memo on instead.
My hand was so steady that it frightened me.
They did not stop for a long time.
When they did, Tierney was laughing again, and the sheets were rustling.
"Your car's at nine?" she asked.
"Booked since Tuesday," Brice said. "I'll have the driver take you home first."
I stared at the dark.
He had not owned a car since the week after my mother's funeral.
He had sold it and said he could not stand to drive anywhere near Route 9 again.
I had thought it was the kindest thing anyone had ever done for me.
"Can I ask you something?" Tierney said. Her voice had changed.
"Sure."
"Do you ever feel sick about the Tull thing?"
My whole body went cold.
Russell Tull was the man whose truck had hit my mother on Route 9 and driven on.
He had been arrested six days later.
Nineteen months ago, a judge threw out the evidence, and he walked.
Brice had told me a hotshot from another firm got him off.
"Why would I feel sick?" Brice asked.
"You told her you sat behind the prosecutor every day. You were at the defense table, and she still thinks you were on her side."
"Tierney."
"I'm only saying, if she ever finds out you were the one who..."
"She won't," Brice said. He sounded bored. "I told her the trial would be too brutal to attend. I told her not to read a word of the coverage, and she didn't."
"But if she ever..."
"I won, Tierney. It's the job. Tull walked, the firm made partner track, and Victoria cried on my shoulder and thanked me for staying with her."
He laughed.
"She trusts me more than she trusts the ground she stands on."
I put my fist against my mouth so they would not hear me breathe.
Brice Wynn had stood at the defense table.
Brice had gotten the man who killed my mother acquitted.
And I had thanked him for it, on the phone, from the other side of the world.
The cake was shaking in my other hand.
I looked at the lid with my careful handwriting on it. Happy Birthday, G.
Then I made my choice.
So I stepped out of the closet.
Tierney screamed and dragged the sheet to her chin.
Brice sat up with his shirt open, and the color left his face.
I walked to the dresser and set the cake down in front of the mirror.
"Happy birthday," I said.
"Victoria." He was off the bed in one move, reaching for me. "Babe, it isn't what it looks like."
"I'm very sure it is."
"I can explain."
"You've got a car coming at nine," I said. "Explain it to the driver."
Tierney was crying. "Victoria, please, I never meant..."
"Don't say my name."
I held up my phone so they could both see the red light.
The recording was still running.
I did not tell them what else I had heard.
Brice stepped in front of the door. "You can't walk out of here with that. Give me the phone."
"Move," I said, "or I scream this building down, and you can explain it to your neighbors and your partners."
He looked at the phone and at my face, and he moved.
I took my suitcase from the closet floor and left the cake where it was.
In the elevator I pressed the lobby button and watched the numbers fall.
My phone buzzed with his name. I let it ring.
The doors opened, and a man in a worn leather jacket was crossing the lobby with a wrapped bottle under his arm.
I knew his face.
He had stood in my mother's kitchen three years ago and promised me, "We're going to get him."
Detective Samson Briggs saw me and stopped.
"Ms. Peltola?" he said. "What are you doing in my brother's building?"
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