What He Fights(6)

I sat there, quiet, like a child, my focus on Noah the whole time, wondering what he was thinking, why he had pretended he didn’t know this woman, Clementine. This beautiful woman, Clementine, who had gone along with Noah’s rouse that he didn’t know her, who had unfettered access to him in the middle of the night, who’d stood on his balcony and touched his hand.

Once our food came, the three of them got down to business.

“I think,” Professor Worthington said, “that we should start with the evidence and see what we might be able to get thrown out. Charlotte, have you been contacted yet by the DA?”

“No.” I shook my head.

“They’ll contact you today, I’m sure. You’ll be asked to go down there for an interview. See if you can get it for tomorrow afternoon. They’ll probably only ask you a few questions – that’s all they’ll need to try to get this brought to trial -- but your answers will be important.”

I could feel Noah’s eyes on me, feel him studying me carefully as the professor talked.

“Okay,” I said.

Professor Worthington opened his appointment book. “Can you be at my office tomorrow morning at seven, Charlotte?” he asked. “So that you can go over your testimony with Clementine?”

Bile rose into the back of my throat. Clementine? I was supposed to sit in a room with this woman while she asked me questions about my sexual relationship with Noah? My heart thrummed in my chest, panic rising inside of me. The tingling sensation returned to my fingers, the one that had overtaken me in the hotel room right before I’d had my panic attack.

“Tomorrow morning?” I frowned, pretending to think about it. I took a sip of my coffee. “What time?”

I caught Noah’s eye across the table. He was still looking at me, his gaze steely. Do something! I wanted to scream. Do not let these people humiliate me any further. Do not make me sit in a room and discuss my relationship with you with another woman, one who was at your house for some unknown reason you tried to keep from me!

I waited for him to jump in, waited for him to say that he would coach me, that he would tell me what to say when the DA interviewed me. But he stayed silent, his eyes never leaving mine.

“Seven am,” Professor Worthington repeated, sounding slightly worried at my obvious inability to pay attention. He looked at Clementine, who nodded her approval. She pulled out a slim appointment book, an old school leather one that was monogrammed with her initials. She made a note of it with a fancy-looking pen.

“That would be fine,” she said. She gave me a friendly smile that was designed to put me at ease, but I looked away without returning it. Somehow, her attempt at kindness only made things worse.

“Good.” Professor Worthington pulled out a sheet of paper. “I had my paralegal draw up a one-sheet based on the evidence provided to us by the DA’s office.”

He handed copies out around the table.

I forced myself to wait a beat, forced myself not to immediately look at the sheet.

Noah had his head down, like he was looking at the paper he’d been handed, but he was really watching me, waiting to see how I was going to react to whatever it was I was about to read.

I told myself that whatever was on that paper, whatever I was about to find out, I needed to have no reaction whatsoever. Not in front of these people.

I lowered my eyes and began to read.

It was a bullet-pointed list, with each of the main areas of evidence bolded into its own section.

I thought I’d have already known at least a couple of the things I was about to find out, thought I would have at least known some of the evidence the DA’s office had against the man I was falling in love with.

But everything on the list was new to me.

Every single thing.

It started with the least damaging – an eyewitness, Daniel DiMatteo, who claimed to have seen Noah in the park with Katie on the morning she was murdered. This in and of itself wasn’t news – Noah had been in the park that morning jogging. However, this Daniel person had said he’d seen Noah arguing with Katie that morning, which didn’t match Noah’s story that he hadn’t seen Katie. But still. Eyewitness testimony was notoriously shaky – people could get things wrong all the time. Professor Worthington would do his best to discredit Daniel DiMatteo. I felt the lump in my throat start to loosen just a tiny bit.

But at the next bullet point, things started to get a little dicey.

People in Noah’s office claimed they’d heard Katie and Noah fighting, had heard raised voices in Noah’s office a few weeks before Katie had been killed. Katie had come storming out, crying.

It was damning – but again, people got into fights with their bosses. It didn’t mean their boss was a murderer.