Chapter 13: The Precinct

The officer put his hand on top of my head and folded me into the back of the car.

Through the window I saw Nicholas pushing through the crowd.

He wasn't running. He was walking very fast, and people got out of his way.

He bent to the glass.

"Don't say anything without a lawyer. Not a word. I'm calling your father."

The car pulled away before I could answer.

The station was twenty minutes inland.

They took my belt, my earrings and the emerald ring.

The officer at the desk held the ring up to the light and wrote it down.

"One ring, yellow metal, green stone."

"It's an emerald," I said.

He didn't write that part.

The holding room had a bench bolted to the wall, a steel toilet, and a light that never went off.

My dress was the linen one my mother had bought for the party.

There were grass stains on the hem from where I'd stood.

I sat on the bench with my knees pulled up and listened to the building.

In my last life I spent Memorial Day weekend at Shelby's party too.

I was Bryant's fiancee then.

Shelby collapsed, and everyone was so worried about her that nobody noticed me crying in the car.

This time I was the one in a cell.

At two in the morning the door opened.

Our family's lawyer came in carrying a paper cup of tea.

He was sixty, rumpled, and still wearing a tuxedo shirt from some other dinner.

"Your father woke me up," he said. "Your fiance has been in the lobby since midnight. He's refused to sit down."

"Is Shelby all right?"

He gave me a long look.

"She's resting comfortably at Southampton Hospital. Her father has a private nurse at the door."

He sat beside me on the bench.

"Tell me exactly what happened. Slowly."

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