“Lilly…” I murmur, trying to keep my fear and concern contained, but it’s difficult when all I want is to know the truth. “What have you done?”
“This!” she exclaims, turning around, and searching for something on the desk, which she finds momentarily and offers it to me. Her fingers are trembling, as she stands there before me, more vulnerable than ever. Strangely, I feel the same way, only I am standing before her with my heart in my hands, not a piece of paper.
Impatiently, I take it from her.
“What is this?” I ask, glancing at it. I don’t even recognize it at first, mostly because my mind is a haze, resulting in my eyesight becoming blurry.
“A ticket,” she explains, as if I should immediately recognize it.
“So?” I frown again, realizing what she’s referring to. “You know I have a few of these.”
I’m even more frustrated at this point. What does a speeding ticket matter at this moment? That can’t be what she was looking for. It makes no sense.
“Yes, but look!” She points at something with her finger. “The date!”
I finally do as she tells me. I go over the small print, checking whatever is written there, one number, one word at a time. Slowly, the realization becomes crystal clear inside my mind. Hope permeates all my senses. My heart is beating more quickly. I can barely catch my breath.
It’s the date the cops asked me about. The time I couldn’t prove, other than with her word. This is the piece of evidence that was lacking to exonerate me.
I grin widely. “You are a fucking genius,” I tell her, walking over to her and grabbing her cheeks with my hands, only to bring her closer to mine but before I can kiss her, she pulls away.
“That’s not all,” she whispers, sounding anxious, as if a dark cloud suddenly appeared on the horizon of her happiness.
“What do you mean?” I wonder. “What else could there be?”
“The detectives,” she starts, then pauses to bite her lower lip. “They approached me with an offer to… to spy on you.”
I immediately let go of her cheeks, as if the touch of her skin scorched me.
“You probably know that my dad is in prison, doing time,” she continues, looking down at her hands, cracking her fingers nervously. Then, she quickly lifts her gaze back up. “But he’s innocent! Only… we never had a good defense. No good lawyer wanted to take on the case, without compensation, which we couldn’t afford. He was found guilty, and I’ve been trying to get someone to reopen his case, without success.”
As she’s talking, I can hear the pain underneath all those words. Of course, I knew about her father. Before I hired her, I had to know everything there was to know about her, even the stuff she didn’t know about herself. I was leaving her with my child, and I had to know who I was leaving my child with. It’s as simple as that.
“Those two detectives offered me a deal: to find dirt on you and they will reopen my dad’s case,” she finally reveals.
“And you agreed to it?” I ask, incredulously.
“Yes,” she nods. “But not to find dirt on you. I wanted to find something that would get them off your back.”
I frown. “But they want to pin this on me. I doubt they’ll help you if you find evidence that proves exactly the opposite of what they asked you to do.”
She gasps. Her lips part, as if the reality of the situation is only sinking in now.
“But…” she starts, not finding the words to continue. “I did snoop, and I found evidence.”
“Not really the kind of evidence they were looking for, is it?” I wonder, realizing exactly what she wanted to do, only her naivety was shining through. She truly believed that she would get the best for everyone involved this way.
“No,” she nods, sounding sad.
“You should have come to me the moment they approached you,” I tell her, trying not to sound judgmental.
“I thought you would be angry,” she admits.
“Well… no one likes it when others go behind their back,” I explain. “That’s why I said, you should have come to me.
“I know that now,” she continues, equally apologetically. “But I did find what I was looking for. It was here all along. You just didn’t see it.”
She sounds so proud of herself, as she should be.