"Ellie." I reach for her leg. "I know it's a lot to take in."
"No." She covers my hand with her own. Her gentle touch a sign. She doesn't hate me. She hasn't judged what I've done. "You didn't kill him. He didn't die that night. He died in a jail cell last year."
"What?" My vision blurs as the guilt lifts. I've never regretted what I'd done but there were moments where I wondered about his family. I had flashes of shame when I imagined him coming out of that night alive and turning his life around. I brushed off those fleeting thoughts quickly whenever I thought about Kip and the way she looked the last time I saw her.
I wanted to go back to help her. I ran in that direction, with my gloves covered in the bastard's blood as sirens wailed their imminent arrival. When I reached the edge of the alcove where she was, I saw two people. Both of them were on their knees, tending to her. I ran then. I tucked the gloves in my jacket, dropped my head and I ran home. I threw everything in a trash bag and waited until the next day when I went to Long Island and destroyed my link to that night.
"Annie helped the police." She searches my face. "She used to notice everything about every person she was around. That helped them tremendously. He was arrested a few months later after he attacked another woman in Connecticut. Annie identified him and he was prosecuted."
"A man died in the park that night, Ellie. I read about it in the paper."
Her lips thin as she closes her eyes. "My dad died in the park that night. He drank himself to death because he'd finally given up."
***
My own fear has kept me captive for more than a decade. I was so scared of being prosecuted for killing that man that I hid behind an emotional wall of my own making. The only person I let in was May until Ellie fell into my lap.
I take the empty glass of water from her hands and place it on the coffee table. After she had explained that her dad died from acute alcohol poisoning, I held her while she cried. She and her sister had no one at that point. Her best friend's family stepped up to the plate. They took the two girls in and gave them a safe place to heal and thrive.
Annie took the time to get to know one of the EMTs who had been there to care for her that night. They fell in love. They married and had three beautiful daughters. A brain aneurysm took her life the day May was born.
Ellie was rushed into surgery while her sister's husband, Clinton, rushed into the ER with his wife on a stretcher. Their daughters had been over at a neighbor's home that day for a playdate and when Annie didn't go to pick up her children, the neighbor went there and used the key they had given her to check on her friend. Annie was unresponsive and when her husband arrived with his uniform on, he tried everything he could to save her life. There was nothing. She'd suffered a major stroke and died in her bed.
"Can I see it now?" Ellie takes my hand and kisses my fingertips. "I want to see it."
"Twenty seconds." I kiss her hand. "I'll be back in twenty seconds."
I sprint down the hallway and unlock the cabinet in the office. I push a bunch of loose photographs aside as I dig in the top drawer for a plastic bag. I find it. I yank it out before I take double strides to get back to where Ellie is.
I place the bag in her lap and she doesn't move. She stares at it. "Yes. This is it."
"You remember it?" I ask as I lower myself next to her. "Do you remember it, Ellie?"
Her hand carefully glides over the surface of the bag and the blanket and note that is trapped inside. I'd put it in the bag on the advice of my attorney. He wanted me to keep it preserved in the event that I'd be faced with a custody battle.
She cranes her neck to try and read the note. "I remember it. It was such an unusual blanket for a baby to be wrapped it. I kept thinking that it looked like the torn piece of a quilt. I asked her where it came from."
"The woman holding May?" I refuse to call that woman May's mother. That's not who she is. It took Kristof less than thirty minutes to learn her name after I told him that she was a witness to Ellie's shooting.
Jennifer Richardson abandoned her premature daughter in the lobby of my building sixteen hours after she gave birth to her. The note she left with May listed her time of birth. She wrote that she was doing it because she realized that her life didn't have room for a child. She wanted May to be safe and to live with someone who could give her what she needed. She ended the note with a vague promise that if things didn't work out for her, she'd be back for our daughter.
May was her backup plan which meant I'd never let her near my daughter.
"Where did she say it came from?" I ask because I'm curious. I want to know Jennifer's mindset between the time my daughter took her first breath and the moment she left her alone in a cardboard box.