Page 48 of In the Air Tonight

“No, I’m not sure! Would you be if you were me?”

“I wouldn’t have sat on this for more than a decade.”

“Really? You’re so certain of that? You would’ve had the stomach to have an entire town of people you’ve known all your life turn on you for daring to accuse one of your own of such a thing? You would’ve had the fortitude to have your only brother hate you because you were accusing one of his closest friends ofa monstrous crime? You would’ve been okay with being a social outcast, a pariah, a Facebook target, when you were seventeen?”

“Maybe not,” he concedes, “but there’re a lot of years between seventeen and thirty-one.”

“I realize that, and it shouldn’t have taken this long. I don’t know what else I can say other than I was wrong. I knew it then, and I know it now. I want to fix it.”

“I’ll need to bring this new information to Neisy. We’d need her onboard to reopen the case.”

“Do you know where she is?”

“No, I don’t. I’ll have to find her. Her cousin still runs the restaurant where she and I worked together. I’ll start there.”

He takes down my phone number and promises to get in touch after he talks to her and the AG.

“Do you believe me, Houston?”

After a long pause, he says, “I believe you’d have no reason to make up something that’ll turn your life upside down as much as it will Neisy’s and Ryder’s.”

“Thank you.”

“I want you to be prepared, Blaise. If we go forward, it’ll be ugly.”

“I understand.”

“You need to find somewhere safe to stay.”

“I can go to my mother’s house.”

“No, you can’t.” He writes something down and then hands me a sticky note. “Go see my friend Jack Olsen and tell him I sent you. He’s got a couple of cottages for rent on his property. No one would think to look for you there. I want you to go there and stay there until you hear from me.”

“You really think that’s necessary?”

“I really do.”

Houston

NOW

After Blaise leaves, I sit for five full minutes, trying to wrap my head around what she told me.

Ryder Elliottdidrape Neisy Sutton.

And he’s gotten away with it for fourteen years, during which he attended college, graduated with honors, served eight years in the navy before separating with multiple awards and other honors. An engineer by trade, Ryder has worked for a top company in Providence since his separation from the military. He’s married with three young children and has a house on the same street in Hope where he, Cam and their sisters grew up.

Dallas and I play poker with him and Cam as well as Blaise’s brother, Arlo, on the third Saturday night of every month.

I’m revolted to think I’ve considered him a friend.

All this time…

No one believed Neisy when the allegations first came to light. Not one supporter stepped forward to say she’d never make up something like a rape charge, because no one knew her well enough to vouch for her. Even I, who’d been one of her few friends in the area, had failed to step up, to say there’s no way she’d fabricate such a thing because I wasn’t entirely sure. Even though he was three years younger than me, I knew Ryder and his family much better and for much longer than I’d known her.

I never came right out and said it to anyone, but I’d sided with him.

Everyone had sided with him, including the teammates who’d sworn that she’d slept with all of them. One of them was my own brother, a realization that makes me sick in light of what Blaise told me.

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