My Husband Put My Memory on Trial

Six years ago, my best friend died.

I knew who was responsible. I never said a word.

Richard and Diane got down on their knees on my front porch and begged me. Diane's hands were shaking so hard she could barely hold on to my sleeve.

Richard knelt beside her. But when I looked at him, his eyes slid away from mine and settled on the news van parked at the end of the street.

When the reporters came, I grabbed a kitchen knife and chased them off my lawn.

Grant should have left me then. Everyone told him to. His own parents cut him off over it. Instead, he married me.

And then he made me pay. Every day, he brought people into our house, people whose only job was to make me feel what he believed his sister had felt in her last hours.

Six years of that. My body finally gave out, and Grant used his money, and the company he'd built, to put me on trial in front of the entire country.

"Cassidy Reed, you're not even human!"

I was flat on a hospital bed in the middle of the stage, breathing through a ventilator. My body was too heavy to argue with him.

"Emma was nothing but good to you," Grant said, standing over me. "She treated you like her sister. And this is how you repay her?"

He looked terrible. Twenty-five years old, the youngest billionaire in Boston, and he looked like a man who hadn't slept since the funeral. Maybe he hadn't.

"Stop playing the victim. You protected her killer. Every single thing that's happened to you, you earned."

The extractor was being wheeled toward me. It was a Meridian Neurotech unit, Grant's own company's design, and it had been approved under the Compelled Recall Statute.

Emma's case had been ruled a suicide and shelved years ago. That made it a cold case, and a cold case let the victim's family petition the court to force a recall.

Grant had filed as her family. The doctor who signed my medical waiver had been paid well to ignore what my chart said.

I looked up at Grant and used the last of my strength to shake my head. My eyes filled.

He laughed, one short, ugly sound.

"Save it. You're sorry now? It's too late. Do you have any idea what Emma went through? Why didn't you say something? You should be dead."

He leaned down.

"They say this thing hurts about as much as being electrocuted. So let's see how you like it."

He'd picked the biggest arena in Boston for this. Twenty thousand people filled the seats, and every second of it was being broadcast live, coast to coast. On the giant screens above the stage, the live chat scrolled so fast it blurred. #JusticeForEmma was trending at number one.

Emma's case had been the biggest story in the country that summer. The police had worked it hard. But the one person who could have cracked it kept her mouth shut, and eventually the file went into a drawer.

Richard and Diane sat in the front row. Grant hadn't spoken to them since the wedding, but they'd come anyway.

Diane pointed at me with a trembling finger.

"You wretched woman! Six years, and you still won't tell us who that monster is! Do you even have a conscience?"

Emma was Diane's daughter from her first marriage. She'd moved into the Hartley estate at seven, and Richard had raised her like his own. Now Diane had aged twenty years in six. Richard held her up with one arm, his face like stone, but his eyes burned when they landed on me.

I'd loved Emma, too. We were in the same grade. She was the one who dragged me home to the estate when I was a scholarship kid with nowhere to go on weekends, and the one who pushed me at her stepbrother with a grin. My future sister-in-law, she'd say, and Grant would roll his eyes and let her get away with it.

Someone in the stands shouted, "Bitter foster kid!"

An egg came sailing out of the first rows and burst across my forehead. Warm, slimy, the stink of it filling my nose. Grant signaled security to calm the crowd. He didn't signal them to stop it.

Then the extractor came on.

It felt like thousands of needles driving into my scalp and skin at once. My pupils blew wide. All I could do was make thin, broken sounds around the tube in my throat. My ruined body went rigid.

Grant just stood there, arms crossed, watching me come apart. There was no mercy in his face at all.

Dr. Aaron Pierce, who was monitoring my vitals, was afraid I'd pass out. He held up a syringe. "Mr. Hartley, I'm going to give her a sedative to take the edge off the..."

Grant snatched it out of his hand and swapped it for another one.

"A stimulant? Sir, in her condition, her body might not be able to take it. After this, she'll probably..."

"Use it."

The doctor's mouth closed.

The stimulant hit my bloodstream and the pain dulled, just enough that I could feel everything else. My memories surged up through my skull while the crowd screamed curses at me.

On the giant screen, a picture began to form.

It was Grant, sitting with his back to the camera, in the front row of a funeral home.