Chapter 5

He turned to the judge, to Detective Pierce, to the gallery. His eyes filled.

"Mia," he said, his voice thinned with something that sounded like raw pain. "You know what you're saying? Nina was everything to me. I would have traded places with her without a second thought. I wanted it to be me instead of her every single day since it happened."

He faced Detective Pierce. His voice broke on the next sentence.

"You investigated me. You know you investigated me. My phone records, my movements, my finances — everything. Did you find one thing wrong?"

He was crying properly now, the kind that was hard to watch.

"I know the cup. I know the timing looks strange. But is there really no possibility — none at all — that Nina just wanted it badly that day? That she drank faster than usual? That she was anxious, or excited, or just happened to be in a different kind of mood?"

He spread his hands.

"There are a thousand explanations for a near-empty cup. You can't take one small inconsistency in a timeline and use it to destroy everything else — the dashcam, the biological material, the tyre evidence, the confession, the polygraph — and then point the finger at a man who has spent two months trying to bring the person who killed her to justice."

He looked at me, and his eyes were the eyes of someone wholly devastated.

"Mia. You need help. You know I'm not saying that to be cruel. What happened to Nina destroyed you. It destroyed both of us. But you're not well right now, and this — what you're doing today — you'll regret it. Please. Come with me."

The gallery was murmuring. Half of them were looking at me the way you look at someone who needs to be escorted out.

Detective Pierce held up a hand to stop the bailiff who'd started to move toward me.

He looked at me for a long moment.

"Ms. Holloway," he said slowly. "Finish what you're saying."

The room went quiet.

"The bubble tea," he said. "What exactly does it tell us?"

I took a breath.

"Nina didn't like people knowing she bought bubble tea. It was something her parents and I kept getting on her about. She drank it anyway, but she felt guilty about it — so she always found a seat somewhere and took her time. Forty minutes minimum. She said rushing it was disrespectful to the drink."

"The evening she died, she texted me at eight fifteen from home. She said Sebastian had gone out and she was bored. She asked if I wanted bubble tea."

"The taxi driver places her at the junction at eight thirty-five. Accident at eight thirty-eight."

"She could not have bought that tea in the time between leaving home and arriving at the junction. She could not have drunk it almost entirely in twenty-three minutes."

"The only explanation is: she was with someone before she sent that text. She'd been with them long enough to drink most of a large bubble tea. When she left them, she was close to that junction."

"That someone used her phone to send me the text — to establish that she'd gone out independently, that no one was with her."

I turned to look at Walsh in the dock.

Walsh's eyes had been moving for the last few minutes. They slid away when I glanced at him.

And then it landed.

I remembered why he was familiar.

"Detective Pierce," I said, "I want you to find out where Victor Walsh was in the month before Nina's death. Not the night of the accident. The month before."

Sebastian had gone very still.

I looked at him.

"Nina told me," I said quietly, "that in her last few weeks, she felt like someone was watching her. She didn't say who. She thought she was being paranoid."

"She wasn't paranoid."

I turned back to the judge.

"The anonymous tip that broke this case open — the note with the child's handwriting, the conveniently placed dashcam still — it arrived the day after police suspended the investigation. The timing is not coincidental. Someone needed the case to close before anyone looked more carefully."

"Someone who was watching the investigation. Who knew exactly when to move."

"Someone whose alibi, whose phone records, whose finances were all impeccable — because he'd had six years to plan everything, and had spent two months performing grief so perfectly that no one thought to look at him."

"The lilies are the last piece. Nina knew lilies would kill her. She would never have asked for them. When she said that to Sebastian — days before she died — she was putting something in place. She was making sure that if anything happened to her, the person who knew her best would notice the one thing that couldn't be explained away."

I looked out at the room.

"She was right. I noticed."

The silence in the courtroom held for another moment.

Then Detective Pierce, very slowly, closed his notebook.

He didn't look at Sebastian.

He looked at Walsh.

And then he said to the judge: "Your Honour, I'd like to request a postponement of today's sentencing pending additional investigative review."

Sebastian's mouth opened.

Nothing came out.

I stood in the silence and waited.

Somewhere outside, through the high windows, a cloud moved and let the sun through.

Nina would have known what that meant. She always said light through courtroom windows was the universe showing off.

I held onto that and kept waiting.