God forgive me, I was relieved. I thought I thought you'd struggle with a man who was always one bad month from losing his shop. I wanted the kind of life for you that I never had. And then Simon came along with his manners and his money and the way he opened doors and remembered everyone's name and I pushed you toward him. I told you he was steady.
I told you Henry had shown you who he was by leaving and that Simon was the safe choice. I sat in your kitchen and I talked you into giving that man a chance. Her voice cracked down the middle. I handed you to him, Lia. I looked at a man who works with his hands and decided he wasn't enough and I looked at a monster in a nice suit and called him steady.
And it nearly got the two of you killed. The silence after was complete. Even the monitor seemed to hush. Henry looked at the woman who had sat by his bed through the night, who had chosen of everyone to be the one waiting when he woke. And he understood now what that vigil had been.
It had been penance. She had not come because she still had a claim on him. She had come because she could not look at what her judgment had done and live with herself unless she was there to face it. "You didn't run us off the road. " Henry said quietly. "He did.
A bad opinion isn't the same as a crime, Denise. " "I made the bad opinion the family's opinion. " She said. "I made her doubt her own heart. That's a wound, Henry, even if it isn't a crime. " Lia pulled her hand free, not unkindly, but because she needed a moment to stand inside the truth of what her mother had said. She had spent two years believing she had chosen Simon. To learn now that the choice had been steered, shaped, narrowed down until it hardly felt like a choice at all.
It rearranged something fundamental in her. "We can't do this here. " Lia said finally, her voice thin. "We can't do this now. " She turned to the detective. "What happens next? What do we do? " "For the moment, you let me do my job. " Alvarez said.
"I'll put a request in to have an officer posted on this floor and I'll start the process of locating Mr. Whitlock. I'd advise both of you not to contact him, not to respond to him if he reaches out, and to tell hospital security to flag his name. " He handed Lia a card. "If anything happens, if you so much as think you see him, you call me before you do anything else. Are we clear? " "We are clear," Henry said.