Jo Leigh - Confessions Bundle

“I learned from the experience, used it to catapult me to success. My mother got pregnant just before she was due to start college. She gave it all up to get married and have Marce and me. I wasn’t going to do the same. I was going to make her sacrifice worthwhile by not repeating the same mistake.”

No. He wasn’t going to let her make sense. Wasn’t going to understand. Her choice had cost him too much.

“But you know what?” She looked as innocently lost as their daughter had that day he’d found her huddled behind a boulder on the beach.

“What?”

“I wasn’t over it at all. Instead of learning from my mother’s life, from her choices, I let her death rule me.”

Eyes narrowed, Blake sipped his drink, and motioned to Lucy for two more. “How so?”

“When I first found out about Mary Jane, when I first knew that I was pregnant, what I wanted more than anything was to tell you.”

He might have thought she was lying, but she didn’t seem to care whether he believed her or not. She was telling him what she knew without any apparent interest in his response. She was confessing, not convincing.

“I wanted to believe in the fairy tales and magic my mother had always talked about. The stuff she’d read from those storybooks from the time we were toddlers.”

She stopped as Lucy brought their drinks, and then, without touching hers, continued.

“I let my fear of being too much like her, my fear of making the same wrong decision, my fear of believing in love at first sight distract me from the truth.”

It made perfect sense. But so much had happened between then and now. So much had changed.

“There wouldn’t have been a way for you to contact me,” he heard himself saying. The pain of losing so many years of Mary Jane’s life had been easier to bear when he could blame it all on her. “When I first left, even my father didn’t know how to reach me.”

There was always later, though.

“Would you have come back if you’d known?”

And that was the million-dollar question. Blake would like to believe, unequivocally, that he would have.

He just wasn’t sure.

“And what about five years ago? You were married to an unhappy wife, disoriented yourself, thankful that you didn’t have children.”

Mary Jane would have been three. Still a toddler. Too young to remember that he hadn’t been around from the beginning.

“I would’ve taken responsibility.” He meant what he said.

But how could he have managed that? As she’d already said, he’d had an unhappy wife. He’d been filled with guilt and grief. Disoriented.

She nodded. Stood.

“See you tomorrow,” she said, and walked out, leaving him there with her untouched drink.

THE DEFENSE SPENT a week bringing in witnesses who testified to the character of the defendant. Employees, clients, even friends from Egypt. Juliet built a solid picture for the jury, a picture of a man incapable of defrauding anyone. A man who’d spent his time in the Cayman Islands living like the young married and financially modest man he was, not a man in possession of more than a million dollars. A man who was on the Islands only occasionally in between volunteering for weeks at a time in third world countries. Eaton James had sent money to help feed homeless children. Blake Ramsden taught them to feed themselves.

And still, the jury looked doubtful.

“It’s that damn bank account,” she told Duane late on the third Thursday in August. The trial had been going on for almost four weeks. If she didn’t win them over soon, Blake Ramsden was going to prison.

“What I know,” Duane said, lounging back in the chair across from her desk, “is that I’ve never seen you so emotionally involved in a case.”

She didn’t like his tone. “And your point is?”

“Nothing, Juliet.” He sat forward. “You’re like a daughter to me, you know that.”

She did, and acknowledged his statement with a nod. “But?”

“I just wonder if maybe your emotional involvement with this man is clouding your judgment.”

“You think he’s guilty.”

“I have no idea.” The older man ran a hand over his balding head. “What I do know is that you have a talent for finding the truth and for some reason, that talent isn’t helping you out on this one.”

Her friend and partner had never asked her why Blake, her client, had been at her house that day. He’d never asked why the little girl had run away. But she knew he was hurt that she wasn’t telling him.

If she had any idea what to say, she would.

But she didn’t.

ON THE SEVENTH DAY of testimony, when the defense was due to rest, Mary Jane insisted on attending court.

“He’s my dad, Mom,” she’d said over breakfast that morning. “He needs me there.”

Juliet might have replied if she hadn’t been choked up with tears that she couldn’t let fall. It was the first time the child had acknowledged that she had a dad. Until then, Blake had been a father in the biological sense. And, maybe more recently, a friend. Blake seemed to be capturing his daughter’s heart as surely as he’d captured Juliet’s. When Juliet said nothing, Marcie jumped in, offering to bring the little girl to the afternoon session.

Had there been any chance the jury would deliberate and deliver their verdict that day, Juliet would never have allowed Mary Jane to be there. As it was, she couldn’t justify keeping her away.

Blake had already lost eight years of sharing life with Mary Jane. And she was right. He did need her there.

All morning in court he was restless, and growing more tense as the minutes ticked past. Like her, he could probably see the writing on the wall.

And there wasn’t a damn thing he could do about it except sit there and wait to be hanged.

She offered to take him to lunch, or to have sandwiches brought in to her office. He opted to drive out to the beach instead. She hated to picture him there, all alone, but couldn’t very well stop him from going.

She went to her office alone, instead. And spent the hour and a half poring over numbers and reports and statements that she’d already committed to memory frontward and backward.

BLAKE TOOK HIS SEAT for the afternoon session of court with more peace in his heart than he would have expected. He’d rather die than spend time in prison, but somehow, over the past weeks, he’d come to understand that there was one thing that mattered more than time, or prison, or even life or death. It had finally hit him an hour before, at the beach.

It was the obligation to be true to oneself.

He’d been true to himself when he’d stayed away three years longer than he’d planned—and when he’d come home, despite the difficulty his wife had had adjusting to life in one place.

The obligation to be true to oneself was why Juliet had had to have her baby on her own terms, by herself.

After weeks, months, years of searching, it had taken one walk on the beach with his back completely against the wall to show him what he’d known all along.

Real honesty meant following the dictates of one’s own heart.

He was already seated in court by the time Juliet arrived. She’d been planning to wait outside to walk Marcie and Mary Jane in. He didn’t turn around to see if she had.

But he did try to catch her eye as she slid into her seat beside him. She didn’t give him a chance. Something had happened.

Tight-lipped, she shifted in her seat as they waited for the call to rise. She shot up the second Judge Lockhard asked if she had any further witnesses. He knew that she had not. She’d already presented every piece of evidence she’d disclosed.

“May I approach the bench, Your Honor?”