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My voice disappeared for several seconds. “What pictures?”
“There were photographs of the two of you in Flint,” Aura said. “Outside Ryan’s truck during the cabin weekend.”
The memory arrived before she finished speaking. Ryan wearing sunglasses over the black eye Briggs gave him. My hands shaking as I followed him across the snow and begged him to look at me. Ryan speaking to Briggs as though I wasn’t standing beside his truck, then finally lowering his sunglasses and giving me one brutal sentence before he drove away.
Begging someone to trust you feels like shit, don’t it, mami?
“He wasn’t arguing with me,” I said. “He was ignoring me.”
“They showed you crying beside his truck while Ryan refused to look at you.”
“Lance made that look like intimidation.”
“Yes.”
“What else?”
Bliss wiped beneath one eye. “There was a photograph of the bruise on your wrist.”
My hand closed around the wrist that had healed more than a year ago. “That happened after Ryan left for Milwaukee. I slipped in the shower and bruised it when my wrist hit the bathtub.”
“We know.”
“He wasn’t even here.”
“We know that too.”
“What else?”
Bliss’s face crumpled. “Pictures of you in treatment.”
The floor shifted beneath me. “What pictures?”
“Pictures taken after you hit rock bottom,” she said. “After you’d lost too much weight and entered residential treatment.”
My lungs tightened until every breath became work. Men and women I’d never met had looked at photographs of my body after I had given it too little to function. I was skin over bones. They had studied the hollow places in my face, the sharp angles I once mistook for success, and the physical proof of how thoroughly I’d learned to hate myself.
Lance had seen those same photographs and turned them into ammunition.
“What did he say they proved?”
“That the condition you were in was the result of Ryan’s treatment of you,” Aura said. “He used the pictures from Flint to make Ryan’s silence look like intimidation. He used a bruise Ryan couldn’t possibly have caused and photographs from treatment to suggest you were recovering from an abusive relationship.”
“He knew Ryan had already left.”
“Yes.”
“He knew I was the one who demanded secrecy.”
“Yes.”
“He knew Ryan asked me to stand beside him.”
“Yes.”
“Then how could anyone believe him?”
“He wasn’t trying to tell the truth,” Aura said. “He arranged real moments around a lie because he thought enough paperwork and photographs would make the lie believable.”
