The Last Breath by Kimberly Belle Read Free Book Online Page A

say, not backing down, “and we were talking about Dad’s case.”
    “Whatever. That woman is a What Not to Wear episode waiting to happen. Oh, Lord. Now she’s passing out flyers.” She snorts and rolls her eyes. “Probably for their next snake handling.”
    “Could you focus, please? This professor is writing a book about wrongful convictions. He thinks Dad’s is one of them.”
    And now, I think, I’ve got my sister’s attention. Her gaze whips to mine, her good-humored expression fades and her brows slide into the ghost of a medically frozen V. She reaches for the wineglass and drains it, knuckles tightening ever so slightly around the stem. And then she dabs her glossy lips with a napkin and the storm on her face vanishes as quickly as it came, like a twister sucked up into a dissolving cloud.
    “You’d think people would’ve heard by now that snake bites everybody.” Her voice is a little too loud, and a lot too vehement. “Even holier-than-thou Bobby Humphrey. By the time they got him the antivenom, he was foaming at the mouth. Besides, I thought the whole point was prayer, not antivenom. Isn’t that kind of cheating?”
    “Lexi! We have to talk about Dad.”
    She leans across the bar, snatches the bottle of wine and fills her glass to within an inch of the rim. “The hell we do.”
    A familiar frustration ties a string of knots across my shoulders. My sister has always been a great believer in the power of denial. How else can I explain her staying in the one place where she will always be the murderer’s daughter?
    But what if what Jeffrey Levine said is true? What if all this time, I’ve been running from something my father didn’t do?
    “Did you hear me? This professor thinks Dad might be innocent. What if he’s right?”
    She shakes her head definitively, almost violently. “He’s not.”
    “But what if he is?”
    “He’s not! ” she shrieks, shrill enough that I jump. Everyone jumps, in fact. A young couple at a table to our left, three friends sharing a plate of fried calamari at our backs, two pot-bellied men in trucker hats three stools down. Even Jake looks up from the beer he’s pulling at the opposite end of the bar, and hell’s bells, I catch pity in his expression.
    But Lexi has always preferred the part of sexy bombshell over damsel in distress, and really, who can blame her? Our life has been distressing enough. She tosses him a beauty-queen smile and reaches for her wineglass with a shaking hand, and all around us, conversations pick back up one by one.
    I lean close, lower my voice. “Why do you refuse to discuss the possibility he may not be guilty?”
    She glances over, and I see a flash of my sister. The real Lexi. The unguarded and devastated Lexi. “Because it’s a whole hell of a lot easier than praying he’s innocent.”
    And then she flicks her perfect hair over a perfect shoulder and real Lexi’s gone.

5
    WHEN THE KITCHEN door swings wide a few minutes later revealing Jake coming at us with two plates piled high with tonight’s special, I realize I’m ravenous. Outta-my-way-and-let-me-at-it ravenous. He slides our dinners onto the bar, and I scoop up a bite and shove it in my mouth before he’s pulled back his hand.
    “Omigod,” I mumble around the food, slicing off an even bigger bite of duck, stuffing it in with the half-chewed hash. I say more, but judging by the confused look on Jake’s face, none of it very intelligibly.
    He blinks at Lexi. “What did your sister just say?”
    She watches me take another monster bite, and her pretty nose wrinkles. “I don’t know, but you better back up.”
    When you live in an area mired in chronic famine, it’s easy to forget how food is supposed to taste. Meals are freeze-dried and carried down dusty roads to distribution sites where nobody cares if they please the palate, as long as they nourish the body. After a while, you stop missing the tangy sweetness of a juicy plum, the prick of sea salt just