Faced with what investigators had assembled, the man Weston had paid to alter my records made the calculation that people in his position make: he confessed, six weeks before that afternoon in the hospital, in exchange for a reduced sentence.
He handed over the altered files, the record of the payments Weston had made him, and the messages — Weston’s own words, arranging the erasure of my future in text messages he’d assumed no one would ever read.
Everything the story needed to stop being my word against theirs.
By the time I walked into Meridian Medical Center that afternoon — for an entirely unrelated reason, a consultation about the very treatment that would eventually give me my daughter — the machinery of consequence was already assembled and idling.
Warrants were being finalized.
The evidence was sealed.
I was not hunting them.
I had simply, finally, become a woman it was dangerous to run into by accident.
And Weston, who had never in his life been able to resist an audience, ran into me.
Chapter 11 — Really?