Fix You: Bash and Olivia, Book 3 by Christine Bell Read Free Book Online Page A

two hundred people at Shorty’s the night it happened. When Whitcomb had asked if there had been any witnesses, I said no, assuming they’d left the second Andy and I entered the bathroom, which meant they’d have precious little to add to the dialogue.
    Maybe I was wrong.
    “How did you find her?” I asked my mother.
    “I had a PI friend of mine put out some feelers at your school. And once Bash’s old boss at Shorty’s found out how far Andy had decided to take things, he hung some fliers up asking for information on the incident. Emily saw one of them and called in. She agreed to give the grand jury a statement.”
    “Thank you,” Bash said quietly. Reid and Matty echoed him, and my mother waved off their thanks.
    “It was the least I could do.”
    Lydia Beckett had been preoccupied with her own problems for a while, but the fact that she took the time and effort to do this for me and Bash moved me close to tears. Maybe there was someone else I could trust.
    “And Dad?”
    Her smile faded and she shook her head.
    I tamped down the disappointment and focused on the positives. We had one more weapon in our arsenal against the Abernathys.
    Linden Whitcomb had taken Emily to the side and was asking her some questions as Andy and his father spoke in hushed tones a few yards away. Senior was red in the face and looking agitated when Andy finally faced my mother.
    “It’s not going to matter. Adding the word of another nobody to the list of nobodies you already have testifying isn’t going to help.” His steely gray eyes were cold enough to give me chills. The “do you know who we are?” was implicit, and if his words weren’t so true, I’d have winced at the cliché of it all. He was like the villain from one of those old ’80s movies my mom loved to watch late at night.
    But the fact was , Andy had the goods to back it up. We’d all but been told that the Abernathys had called in favors and paid off various people in high places to get this to go their way. Maybe he was right. Maybe adding Emily to the mix wasn’t going to help after all.
    Maybe we’d gone through all the motions like we had a fighting chance, when really, we never had a chance at all.
     
    ***
Bash
     
    “Do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you God?”
    The girl in the witness box nodded and leaned forward toward the microphone. “Yes, I do.”
    I settled back into my chair and waited for this farce to be over. Any hope I’d harbored when Lydia Beckett had come into the courthouse with Emily was gone, chipped away bit by bit with each passing witness.
    First, the cops who had arrested me, more than a week after the incident, suddenly recalled me resisting arrest. Which of course never happened.
    Then, the single shot I’d delivered to Andy’s piehole had magically morphed into a “series of blows meant to maim,” according to him. He even managed to produce a doctor’s note claiming that he’d suffered 10 percent disability in the movement of his mouth, which was obviously bullshit because he’d had no problem running it for nearly an hour on the stand.
    Liv had gotten a chance to speak, and was pretty compelling, but the prosecutor badgered her mercilessly about the fact that she hadn’t reported Andy for assault at the time of the incident. In the end, once our relationship was revealed, her testimony was discredited just like we’d thought.
    I risked a glance back at her and she was wringing her hands, smashed between my brothers and her mother, who still looked remarkably cool and composed. I couldn’t fault her. She’d done what she could for me, and that let her off the hook with her daughter, but surely her life would be a lot easier if I wound up in jail long enough for Liv to forget about me.
    I faced front again, and watched as my lawyer approached the stand. Even good old Linden Whitcomb seemed nervous as he ran a hand through his all-too-neatly styled hair and