'What do you mean they're releasing him?' I squeaked, gawking at my mother. She looked up at me over the rim of her swimming-pool sized coffee mug. It was barely eight o'clock in the morning, I'd only had one cup of coffee myself, and she was throwing this news at me? Garrett, former Rosewood police officer, now known as the man who killed Ali, was being released. For one night. To see his sick grandmother, if he even had one.
To be honest, at this stage I really had no idea if Garrett was a good guy or a bad guy. People kept switching sides, from good to bad, so rapidly and so frequently that I could barely keep up. So I stopped trying. I had decided that treating anyone who had been involved in Ali's murder, the NAT Club or was under Jenna's spell, as a suspicious character, one you needed to tread carefully around. And Garrett fulfilled all three of those criteria.
'You heard me. But it's only for a night.' My mother was trying her best to avoid looking me in the eye. 'His grandmother has some rare type of cancer, and the appeals to let him at least see her won out.'
I could barely comprehend this whole thing. Surely someone who was under suspicion of murder would not be let out of jail until a hearing had happened.
'Does he need to have a monitor or anything?' Mom stopped avoiding my gaze and set her coffee cup down.
'No.' She all but whispered. My ears started ringing; they could not be letting him out. 'But he had page five of the autopsy report, surely that's-'
My mother suddenly took her coffee cup to the sink, drained it and rinsed it out, wanting to put an end to the conversation. 'Spencer, I can't talk about this with you.' She turned around and faced me, her gaze meeting mine deliberately. 'You need to let this go, leave it to the authorities. I know perfectly well how you like to stick your nose in things, but we have no idea what this guy is capable of. Leave it alone.' She emphasised the last three words, and with that left the house.
Her words hurt; my own mother, ladies and gentlemen, saying that I liked to poke my nose into others' business. I shouldn't be surprised; she was always taking sides against me, first and foremost with Melissa and then the rest of the world. But I thought that with everything Mona had put us through she'd finally wise up, understand that I didn't happen to people, they happened to me. It's not my fault things got up in my face and begged my nose to press against them.
I felt out of control. My head was starting to spin, my shoulders were tensing (even more than usual) and my hands were shaking. I couldn't tell if I was angry, hurt, offended, scared or just an amalgamation of all of them. However, I did know the cure.