My Husband Saved Her Cat While My Father Bled to Death

The smell hit me first.

Candles. Lilies. Something underneath it all — sweet and wrong, the way a room smells when it's trying too hard to hide something dead.

St. Augustine's was packed. Every pew filled, every face turned toward the front of the nave where Julien Herrera lay in a mahogany casket lined with white satin. The priest was still speaking. I couldn't hear the words. All I could hear was my own breathing and the low, steady pressure of Clyde's hand on my back, steering me down the center aisle like I was luggage.

I hadn't wanted to come. I'd told him that. Three times.

"Clyde, please." I'd grabbed his sleeve in the car. "He tried to rape me. My father shot him to save my life. I can't go in there and — "

"You'll go in." His voice was flat. Final. The voice he used when a conversation was already over. "You'll pay your respects. And you will not make a scene."

I stared at his profile. That jaw. That cold, perfect jaw I used to press my lips against. "Pay my respects," I repeated.

He didn't answer.

Now we were inside, and the Herrera family was watching us from the front row. I felt their eyes like something physical — like fingers pressing into my skin.

Estelle sat in the center. She wore black lace, her dark hair pinned back, her eyes red-rimmed and luminous. She looked fragile. Breakable. She looked like a woman drowning in grief, and when she saw Clyde, her chin trembled and she pressed a handkerchief to her mouth.

Clyde's hand tightened on my back.

I watched him look at her. Something moved across his face — soft, certain, resolved — and my stomach turned over.

He believed her. He still believed every single thing she told him.

"Clyde." I kept my voice low. "Whatever she told you about that night — it's not true. There was a witness. A girl who saw everything. She can testify that my father was defending me —"

"There is no witness." He said it quietly. Almost gently. Which was somehow worse. "Raymond looked into it. The girl recanted. Her family left the city."

The floor shifted under me.

Raymond. His enforcer. A broad, silent man with pale eyes who had been standing near the church entrance when we arrived, hands folded, watching the street. I'd noticed him and told myself it meant nothing.

It meant everything.

Raymond Holt had found her. That teenage girl who had been standing on the corner that night, who had seen Julien's hands on me, who had seen my father raise the gun. Raymond had found her family and done whatever Clyde's men do — and now she was gone, and my father's only defense was gone with her.

Dad was in Rikers. He'd been there for eleven days. Eleven days in a maximum-security facility for a crime he didn't commit, because the man standing beside me had made sure the truth couldn't reach a courtroom.

I felt something crack open in my chest. Not loudly. Just a small, quiet fracture, like ice giving way.

"Kneel."

Clyde's voice. Right in my ear.

I turned to look at him. "What?"

"Go to the casket." His eyes were steady. Immovable. "Kneel. Show them respect."

"Clyde —"

His hand moved from my back to my shoulder. Not violent. Precise. The way you'd guide something that wasn't cooperating.

And before I could pull away, my knees found the kneeler in front of Julien Herrera's open casket, and I was down.

The room went quiet in a way that wasn't quiet at all.

I stared at the white satin. I would not look at his face. I would not.

"That's her." A woman's voice from the front pew. Loud. Deliberate. "That's the daughter of the man who murdered my son."

Mrs. Herrera. She was on her feet. Her face was a mask of controlled fury, and she was looking at me the way you look at something you want to grind under your heel.

"Murderer's daughter." Someone else. A cousin, maybe. "Coming in here like she belongs."

"She should be on her knees in a cell, just like her father."

The words rained down. I kept my eyes on the white satin. My hands were folded in my lap and I pressed my fingers together hard — hard enough that my knuckles ached — because it was the only thing I could control.

I did not cry.

I would not give them that.

Behind me, Clyde stood perfectly still. I didn't have to turn around to know his expression. Composed. Appropriate. The face of a man honoring a debt.

Estelle was watching me from her pew. I could feel it.

And somewhere in a cell on Rikers Island, my father was waiting for a witness who no longer existed.

The fracture in my chest spread another inch.

I stayed very still and let it.