“Only when you need me to.”
“And the vineyard?”
“We’re married, Eliza.
It makes sense for us to operate as a team.”
“A team.”
“Exactly.”
I placed the pen on the table.
“Like you and Sienna?”
The room changed.
Garrett didn’t move.
Then he smiled.
“I don’t know what she told you, but she’s unstable.
You know that.”
I had expected denial.
What surprised me was how quickly he attacked her.
“She told me about the money.”
“She’s an addict who wants access to an inheritance she didn’t get.”
“David knew about the money too.”
That did it.
His face went empty.
Only for a second.
But I saw it.
“What does David have to do with this?”
I reached beneath the table and brought out David’s battered phone.
Garrett stared at it.
For the first time since I’d known him, he looked genuinely frightened.
“Where did you get that?”
I didn’t answer.
I pressed play.
David’s voice filled the dining room.
Money moving through a company attached to my wife’s sister concerns me.
Garrett stood so quickly his chair struck the floor.
“Turn that off.”
The next clip began.
Sienna’s recorded voice said, David wasn’t supposed to die.
Garrett crossed toward me.
Before he reached the end of the table, the doors opened.
He stopped.
There was nowhere for the performance to go after that.
He tried anyway.
He said the recordings had been altered.
He said Margaret had hated him.
He said Sienna had fabricated everything because she resented me.
He said I was grieving and being manipulated.
Then investigators confronted him with the transfers.
His explanation changed.
When they confronted him with his own voice on my recent recording, it changed again.
When they told him Sienna had already given a statement and surrendered her messages, he looked toward me with something colder than anger.
Betrayal.
As if I had broken an agreement by refusing to remain gullible.
“You were supposed to trust me,” he said.
I thought of my mother’s handwriting.
Trust your ears before you trust your heart.
“I did,” I said.
“That was the problem.”
Garrett was taken away for questioning that night.
