Chapter 19: Not For Sale

I looked at the check for a long time.

Five hundred thousand dollars was more money than my dad had made in ten years of roofs.

It was a residency. It was a studio. It was never having to ask anybody for anything again.

Every person at that long table was watching me decide.

Blaire was smiling a little, down at her nails.

She thought she already knew.

I picked up the check.

I tore it in half.

Then in half again, and again, until it was too thick to tear.

I set the pieces on the nondisclosure agreement like a little pile of snow.

"No," I said.

The senior lawyer sighed.

"Miss Prewitt, I'd urge you to think about the cost of a trial. To you. To your family. Every detail of your private life..."

"Has already been in a group chat with three hundred people," I said. "Your client put it there. I've seen the cost."

I turned to the end of the table.

The prosecutor from the county had come at the board's request.

She was a heavyset woman in a gray suit, with a notebook she hadn't opened all morning.

"You said if I had anything else, to bring it to you," I said.

"I did."

I took a folder out of my bag and slid it to her.

My freezer video, on a drive. A copy of the restroom photo.

The statement from Blaire's friend, handwritten and signed, about the brunch and the picture.

And a page from the detective, with a fact I hadn't known until Friday.

The caterer's man in the black vest had been found. He'd been paid two hundred dollars cash to tell me my stepmother had fainted.

He'd said who paid him.

The prosecutor read it with her glasses on the end of her nose.

Then she looked at Blaire's father.

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