A. M. Taylor - Innocent or Guilty?

A division of HarperCollins Publishers

www.harpercollins.co.uk

One More Chapter

an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins Publishers 2019

Copyright © Annie Taylor 2019

Cover design © HarperCollins Publishers Ltd 2019

Cover photographs © Shutterstock.com

Annie Taylor asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Ebook Edition © July 2019 ISBN: 9780008312930

Version: 2019-08-23

For my parents

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page Innocent or Guilty? A. M. TAYLOR A division of HarperCollins Publishers www.harpercollins.co.uk

Copyright One More Chapter an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF www.harpercollins.co.uk First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins Publishers 2019 Copyright © Annie Taylor 2019 Cover design © HarperCollins Publishers Ltd 2019 Cover photographs © Shutterstock.com Annie Taylor asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins. Ebook Edition © July 2019 ISBN: 9780008312930 Version: 2019-08-23

Dedication For my parents

Chapter 1. Then

Chapter 2. Now

Chapter 3. Then

Chapter 4. Now

Chapter 5. Then

Chapter 6. Now

Chapter 7. Then

Chapter 8. Now

Chapter 9. Then

Chapter 10. Now

Chapter 11. Then

Chapter 12. Now

Chapter 13. Then

Chapter 14. Now

Chapter 15. Then

Chapter 16. Now

Chapter 17. Then

Chapter 18. Now

Chapter 19. Then

Chapter 20. Now

Chapter 21. Then

Chapter 22. Now

Chapter 23. Then

Chapter 24. Now

Chapter 25. Then

Chapter 26. Now

Chapter 27. Then

Chapter 28. Now

Chapter 29. Then

Chapter 30. Now

Chapter 31. Then

Chapter 32. Now

Chapter 33. Then

Chapter 34. Now

Chapter 35. Then

Chapter 36. Now

Chapter 37. Then

Chapter 38. Now

Chapter 39. Then

Chapter 40. Now

Chapter 41. Then

Chapter 42. Now

Chapter 43. Then

Chapter 44. Now

Chapter 45. Then

Chapter 46. Now

Chapter 47. Then

Chapter 48. Now

Chapter 49. Six Weeks Later

Chapter 50. That Night

Chapter 51. Now

Keep Reading …

Acknowledgements

Also by A. M. Taylor

About the Author

About the Publisher

They find the body on a Sunday.

He didn’t return home the night before, which isn’t unheard of, but when he doesn’t make it back in time for church and he still isn’t home by the time they return, the family begins to worry. His mother rings the police and they tell her to sit tight, while his father calls his brother and gathers up a few of the boy’s friends to set up a search party.

He’s lying in the woods.

He has been all night.

He’s face down in the mud. There’s blood on the side and the back of his head, matting down his hair, pressing it to his skull. It’s a friend who finds him, calling out for the boy’s dad when he does so, the father running wildly towards him, pushing him out of the way, slipping in the mud.

He makes the mistake of moving him. Grabbing him by the shoulders to shake him awake in desperation. When he pulls his hands away they’re covered in blood and as the stories soon will go, the father screams, grief curdling at his throat. The police are called again and this time they come, sirens wailing on the damp air, a parent’s desperate call. Friends and family are pushed to the side lines, forced to watch as the routines of a crime scene establish themselves and the detectives take statements, waiting for the medical examiner to arrive.

The boy’s uncle is sent back to the house with a female police officer in tow to break the news to the mother. Neighbors will go on to tell other neighbors about how she answers the door, arm outstretched, finger pointing at her brother-in-law’s broken face as she shouts “No, no, no, no, no,” over and over and over again, until the female police officer wraps her arms around the older woman’s shaking shoulders and draws her inside her own home.

Word spreads, text messages sent, phone calls answered, whispers met by gasps, grimaces of shock followed by the promise of tears.

Tyler Washington is dead they’re saying.

Murdered.

Found in the woods with his skull bashed in.

Less than a week later my twin brother is arrested.

My brother was born eleven minutes and 37 seconds after me. It was an easy delivery for twins apparently, or so our mom always told us. We were her second pregnancy, and we practically slipped right out; she and Dad barely making it to the hospital before I made my appearance. I came screaming into the world, face red and pink and white, covered in blood and placenta, all of it quickly wiped away to make me clean. Ethan slipped out silently though; maybe I was taking up all the oxygen in the room. In the womb. But Mom says the nurse just gave him a little slap on his small round bottom and he joined me in my new-to-the-world screams.

Twins.

Mom says she was terrified to begin with. Not just of how much more work and effort was involved but with how different we were from our sister Georgia. We took up twice the space, twice the time, twice the breast milk, twice the effort, but we were also strangely self-sufficient she’d tell us. She felt superfluous, she said. Our older sister Georgia had needed her, wanted her, all the time. We needed her occasionally, and wanted only each other. But that was a long time ago and by the time Ethan is arrested we barely speak to one another. Sometimes, I like to tell myself that it’s because we don’t need to; we already know what the other is thinking. But it’s not like that. We shared a womb, shared a life and then suddenly, we split. Into two different people and the difference was what we needed to make us two different people. Otherwise we’d have just spent the rest of our lives as ‘the twins’.