Page 109 of Only Fate

Luckily, she’s in her office.

I watch her through the glass door, sitting behind her desk and talking on the phone.

“I need to call you back,” she says when she notices me and ends the call.

She gestures for me to take the chair directly across from her.

She looks at me with sadness. “Honey, you didn’t tell Essie about Earl. Why?”

“I planned to,” I say around a stressed breath. “I was just waiting for the right time.”

“Theright timewas when you opened the file and saw she was involved.”

“Did you know she was involved?”

“No, I only thought she was the girl from the pub until you introduced her by name. Now that I look back at it, Terrance had mentioned her name, but I never thought too much about it.”

“I can’t help you with Earl’s case.”

Her shoulders sag. “What if he’s innocent, Adrian?”

“Or—hear me out—what if he’s guilty and playing you and everyone else here? Essie said it was Earl. She was there.”

“Essie never saw the person behind the wheel. She saw Earl’struck.”

“A truck he only had access to.”

“Is that a fact?” She sighs, softening her voice. “Do you want to keep Essie safe?”

“Until the day I die.”

“Then, let’s find out who really hurt her.”

“Terrance, you lived here when the accident with Essie happened, right?”

Terrance sets his coffee mug down. “I did.”

I motion toward a maroon diamond-patterned chair in his office.

He nods, waving me inside.

If I stay in Blue Beech, this office will be mine one day. It smells like dust. Books and awards line the wooden shelves. His beat-up desk shows wear of hard work, and his paperwork lies on his desk, organized into three even stacks.

I made copies of all the files from Earl’s case before returning them to my mother. I’m not stupid enough to just hand them back, especially if Earl is guilty and we have to fight to keep him behind bars.

“Did anything seem off to you about the case?” I ask, making myself comfortable. “In your honest opinion, do you think Earl committed the crime?”

He straightens his back in his chair. “Earl had a public defender. An inexperienced young man who’d had maybe four or five cases. Sometimes, when he was in town, he’d stop in and ask me questions. But my wife eventually asked me not to involve myself. She didn’t want to get on anyone’s bad side in town.”

“Was that common? Did people blame him out of fear of retaliation or because they wanted to agree with the rest of the town?”

“The accident killed a young man the town loved. People were mad. There were no other suspects. Earl looked and fit the part.”

“Doyoubelieve he did it?” I stress.

Terrance has done this a long time, and I’ve already learned so much from him. I value his input.

“It doesn’t matter what I believe,” he replies. “A group of his peers did and convicted him.”

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