Then he said, “Why didn’t you tell me?”
And I understood that he genuinely believed that was a kind question.
Ava got up off the floor. She didn’t answer him. She went past both of us and out of the kitchen, and I heard her go down the hall to my office, and I heard the bottom drawer of my desk open.
She came back holding a phone in a cracked mint-green case, powered off, exactly where I had told her to leave it in November.
She held it out to her father.
“It’s all on there,” she said. “She told me not to delete anything.”
PART 4
Daniel wanted to go to Grant’s house that night.
He had his keys in his hand and his boots on and he was fifteen feet from the door, and I stood in front of it, and I did something I am not proud of and would do again.
I told him that if he drove to Bellrose Court and put his brother through a wall, the only person who would be arrested that night was him. That Grant would spend the next morning with a lawyer and a bruise and a story about a violent brother-in-law and an unstable teenager. That every message on that phone would become something a defense attorney called retaliation.
