Page 118 of Family Bonds- Garrett & Justine

“John Bloom is pretty easy to work with so far,” she said. “When he gets back to me. I know he’s slammed and there are other cases on his desk. I’m not a priority, I’ve been told. I get it. I’d like this to move faster. I know my stepmother is guilty and she should be behind bars where she belongs and not living in a nice apartment on my father’s money.”

“Seems like she doesn’t have as much of it as she wants,” Karly said. “Roark filled me in on the will and how it turned out and what is remaining is frozen right now.”

“She was greedy. Sheisgreedy. Says she needs money for her defense. That’s not my problem. She shouldn’t have killed my father then. She told me not that long ago she would drop it so that she could get her share and we’d have to buy her out of the house, which was left to the three of us equally. I told her if she dropped it, we’d contest it due to the case not being closed.”

“Good for you,” Roark said. “That would be our advice right away. Keep her desperate. Desperate people do stupid shit all the time.”

“My father paid the price for that,” she said.

“We are sorry for that,” Karly said. “But we are going to try to give you closure.”

She noticed they didn’t say justice.

They couldn’t promise that. They didn’t know enough.

No one did right now.

“I think closure might be the only thing I can hope for. Baby steps.”

“Why don’t we get started,” Roark said. “We’ve got some papers for you to sign and then once we get what we need out of this, we’ll reach out to John Bloom and see if we can get in touch with this security system and do the legwork for them.”

“Anything to get this moving,” she said.

When she walked out an hour later, she felt more hope than she had in a long time and called her sister right away.

“How did it go?” Jordan asked. “I’ve been waiting for this call.”

“Aren’t you working today?” she asked.

“Nope,” Jordan said. “I’m going in tonight.”

“Sorry if I woke you,” she said. It was only ten in the morning. She’d come over on the ferry last night so she wasn’t rushing around this morning.

She was going to get a hotel and Garrett told her that was crazy and gave her the security code to get into his condo.

He wanted to be with her and she said she had to do this on her own. For a number of reasons.

She didn’t think he’d give in, but he had.

Maybe he couldn’t get the time off. She didn’t know, she didn’t ask.

This was one of those things they talked about and she’d fill him in, but she had it covered.

“You didn’t,” Jordan said. “I’ll go to bed around noon and get about seven hours of sleep before my shift. Works better for me that way.”

“Good,” she said. “I feel great about the meeting. I hope John is onboard about us getting our own counsel to get the information.”

“He’d be an idiot to not be,” Jordan said. “It takes it off his plate. The sooner we can get that footage, the sooner we can move on from it.”

“If it turns out to be anything,” she said. “I’m trying not to get my hopes up in case it’s a dead end. Maybe it’s cameras on the front and back porch and it’s silly. Or his office or something.”

“It could be all sorts of things,” Jordan said. “Previous fights they had showing that Dad was the victim because we know it.”

“We do, Jordan. But would he want that out there? That his wife might have been verbally or physically abusing him?”

She’d been thinking about this for a few weeks now but keeping it to herself.

“If it puts Elise in jail, then yes,” Jordan said. “Everyone that knew Dad well loved him. Those that didn’t know him, I don’t care about. But maybe it needs to get out there that men are victims too. It’s not something to be embarrassed about.”

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