Page 80 of The Woman By the Lake

So he took the wine from his mother and topped her up.

Then he took his beer, Nadia’s wine, and hit a chair in the dining room.

He put Nadia’s wineglass at the seat beside him.

Riggs came down from making sure his boy was settled in for the night to see Nadia on his couch, her stocking feet on the edge of his coffee table, her laptop on her thighs, her head turned to watch over her shoulder as he approached.

His mom was gone.

Hernandez was still out there.

And later, Nadia was going to be in a bed that was as far away from his as his house could put her, and still, that was way too close for his peace of mind.

“He good?” she asked.

“Yeah,” he answered.

“Good. Come here, I want to show you something.”

He descended the steps into the living room and sat beside her.

Nadia instantly scooched closer and then listed into his side.

It felt good. It felt comfortable. It felt right.

But damn.

He’d been fucking with her head, he knew it, but even if he knew he shouldn’t do it, he couldn’t stop himself, and now he knew he’d fucked up.

Even having that thought, he shifted to pull his arm from between them so he could drape it across the back of the couch, but mostly because that was close to her shoulders.

He could tell himself that made him even more comfortable, and that would be true.

But it wasn’t the only reason he did it.

Nor the primary one.

“So last night, when I got home, I emailed a friend of mine who practices estate law in Chicago,” she stated. “And she sent me some super interesting stuff.”

She was scrolling through a document that looked legal on her laptop.

“I haven’t had a lot of time to read through it,” she carried on. “But Susan started with a cursory search as a favor, but then she got engrossed, because she told me she’s never seen a case this bizarre. So she wrote a whole brief to me detailing what she’s found so far, along with sending a ton of stuff.”

“What are you talking about?” Riggs asked.

She was clicking into another document, but she stopped doing that to tip her head back to catch his eyes. “Lincoln, Sarah and Roosevelt Whitaker.”

Well, goddamn.

“She found something already?” he asked.

“She found a lot of things, Riggs,” she answered. “All through filed court documents. First, she was intrigued, because she said the courts can go slow, but eight years of contention is unusual.”

“No shit,” Riggs remarked.

“I know, right? So she started at the beginning, and get this, they had joint accounts.”

“Who?”

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