The room was so quiet, only their voices filling it and even then Avery spoke in hushed, almost reverent tones. Liam found himself nearly whispering his questions. “Is this the woman who hit you?”
She nodded. “The girl, yes. Like I said, she was sixteen at the time of the accident. She was an honor student, graduating early. She admitted to having two beers at the party when the police first interviewed her. In New York, if you’re under twenty-one your blood alcohol level doesn’t really matter as long as they can prove alcohol is in your system. It could have been a tiny amount, and they still would consider her drunk. But there was a huge mistake at the hospital and her toxicology labs got mixed up with someone else’s, and even the cheap lawyer her parents had hired managed to get the whole case thrown out because of it. But I believe her about the beers. I really do. No one at the party saw her have more than two, and she was drinking water when she left according to all accounts. I honestly believe it was the phone distraction that caused the accident.”
“That’s not an excuse, Avery. She killed two people.”
She crossed her arms over her chest, a defensive move. “You’re going to be like the rest of them, I can see. Just let me finish. Stephanie came to see me. My mother-in-law was furious because the case had been thrown out.”
“Why weren’t you angry?”
“I was. I was so mad I could have killed her, but you have to understand years had gone by.”
“Years where you couldn’t walk.” Years where she’d been alone in a string of hospital beds.
“Are you going to let me finish or do you want to judge me now?” She stared at him, her body closed down. What the hell was she going to tell him? Had she somehow killed this girl? She continued when he was silent. “So she came to see me, and she was so utterly different than the girl I’d read about. You have to understand. I was a little obsessed with her for a while. I read all the papers and looked her up on the Internet. She’d been vibrant and pretty. She’d been that girl who volunteered for everything according to the news accounts. She had so many people willing to speak up for her. You know usually when something bad like this happens, people go away, but they stood up for her. They loved her. She’d been very lovable and kind. From her teachers to the volunteer coordinator at the hospital where she worked, no one had a bad thing to say about her. She wanted to be a doctor, you see. But the girl who stood before me that day was so dark. Thin. Like she’d been starving herself. Her mom had sent me a letter begging me to meet with her because she just knew that Stephanie was going to kill herself. The guilt was eating her alive, and her mom thought I might be able to forgive her.”
Shit. Had this girl killed herself and Avery couldn’t handle the guilt? It wasn’t her fault. The girl had killed Avery’s husband and child. She didn’t deserve forgiveness.
Avery’s arms got tighter, like she was attempting to turn in on herself, to hide away. “I agreed because I was going to tell her to go to hell. I was going to tell her that she should do it. She should kill herself and do it so it hurt. I was going to suggest several ways to make it happen. I even saved up my pain meds in case she was a baby and needed to go out easy.”
Fuck. What had she done? Liam could have put a bullet through the girl and never thought of her again, but not Avery. Avery would die inside knowing what she’d done.
Her tears had started up again. “And then she walked in and all I could see was my baby. She was just a girl. She wasn’t some monster. And I thought about Maddie. What if my baby had lived and she’d made a mistake and had no one to offer her forgiveness? I had to wonder if I would really drag Stephanie’s mother into my hell. Into Lydia’s hell.”
“You forgave her.” He let out a long breath he hadn’t known he was holding. A deep sense of relief invaded his veins. He could see her doing it. She would say all the right words to save someone else even if they had done her great harm. “And your mother-in-law won’t talk to you because of it?”