Free Love is Murder by Sandra Brown Page B

sympathetic, of course. I knew that. She would try to soothe my wounds, as she always had. She would do everything she could to protect me from further harm… . But behind it all, hidden just beneath the surface of every word and deed, she would be gloating. Every syllable she uttered would be laced with that mother knows best tone that she had perfected over the past thirty years.
    Both she and I were victims, simply because of our gender. No man could ever be trusted and we ladies had to stick together if we wanted to survive. Love and happiness were elusive, unrealistic goals if we depended on the opposite sex to provide them for us. Any woman who thought she had achieved the fairy tale was a deluded fool, just as I—and she—had been.
    But I didn’t want to believe that. I didn’t want to believe what I’d had with David was a lie. Even with the evidence staring right at me, a part of me thought that there had to be a mistake. That, in our case, the fairy tale was true.
    How was it possible that I could be so easily duped? Surely David couldn’t have been acting, could he?
    And surely I wasn’t that stupid.
    Was I?
    Everything I saw on my television screen told me I was. Everything I’d seen with my own eyes. Heard with my own ears.
    Whether it had been an accident or a premeditated act, my boyfriend was both a philanderer and, yes, a murderer. There was simply no way around that fact.
    And I had been there, right outside the hotel, when it happened.
    God save me.
    My mother was still chattering away in my ear, her voice full of alarm, and I know I said something in return, but I couldn’t tell you what it was.
    I had stopped listening to her. Put her on mute as my mind reeled, a cacophony of thoughts swirling inside my brain with such ferocity that I could barely contain them, feeling them build and build as if an orchestra were trapped in there, playing the final crescendo of a dark, discordant symphony.
    Then, clicking off the phone midwhine, I went into my bathroom and spent the next fifteen minutes hunched over the toilet bowel.
    No point in holding back now.
    * * *
    “Thank God you answered,” he said. “I was convinced I’d never talk to you again.”
    “I almost didn’t,” I told him. “I’m still not sure why I did.”
    The trial was a month past and a verdict and sentence had been handed down. David had been found guilty of Voluntary Manslaughter and would be spending the next fifteen years in a California penitentiary.
    I hadn’t attended the trial. Had no desire to. There had been some talk of calling me as a witness, but nobody except Mother knew that I had flown to Los Angeles that day. They hadn’t even bothered to check. And after sending a Boise P.D. liaison to interview me, the prosecutor decided I had nothing substantial to contribute to the case.
    I was, after all, simply the grieving ex-girlfriend who had been completely clueless about her boyfriend’s extracurricular activities. I wanted nothing to do with David. Didn’t care if I ever saw him again, and couldn’t wait for the news media to get tired of the case and leave me alone.
    By the time the verdict was read, David and Kim and their disastrous sex game had become little more than a footnote as the news moved on to bigger and better scandals. And a month later, I doubted that anyone could remember either of their names.
    None of which had kept David from calling me. His phone privileges seemed to be on a set schedule, and every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon he left a message on my voice mail, begging me to come see him. To let him explain what had happened. That what I was seeing on TV was not the truth. Not even close.
    It killed me to hear his voice. To know he was in such pain. But I dutifully erased each of the calls and went on with the business of trying to put my life back together, despite the nagging desire to believe him. Unless he was the world’s greatest liar, the sincerity in his tone was hard to