“Excuse me,” he said, and his voice carried clean through the church. “My name is Curtis Whitlow. I’m the attorney who handled Layla Boone’s estate.”
Terrence’s head snapped up. “Now? You’re doing this now?”
Mr. Whitlow didn’t blink. “Your wife left very specific instructions,” he said. “Her will is to be read today, in front of her family. And in front of you.”
He opened the folio.
“There’s a section,” he continued, “that Layla asked to be read aloud, at her funeral, in this exact room.”
I need to back up, because none of what happened that day made sense without what came before it.
Layla was thirty-two, two years younger than me, and the kind of person who mothered everyone around her long before she had a child of her own. She married Terrence six years earlier, right after he finished his contractor’s license, back when Piney Ridge still felt like a town where nothing bad ever really happened.
They’d been trying for a baby for three years when she finally got pregnant. I remember her calling me, crying happy tears into the phone, saying she was finally going to get everything she’d wanted.
Two months before she died, that same phone call turned into a different kind of crying.
“There’s texts, Mika,” she’d said, sitting on my kitchen counter with her hand resting on the small curve of her belly. “From a woman named Vanessa. From his job site office. They’ve been going on for almost a year.”
I wanted her to leave him that same day. She didn’t.
“I need to protect the baby first,” she told me, and I didn’t fully understand what she meant until much later. “I already talked to a lawyer. I’m handling it the right way.”
That lawyer was Curtis Whitlow.
For six weeks, Layla quietly rebuilt her life around a truth she hadn’t shared with Terrence yet — that she knew, that she’d documented it, that she was protecting herself and Elijah financially before she ever said a word to her husband about the affair.
What none of us understood at the time was that Layla hadn’t just found out about an affair. She’d started receiving messages of her own — unsigned, from a blocked number, warning her to “let him go” and that she was “going to lose more than a husband” if she didn’t. She’d written about it in a small leather journal she kept in her nightstand, the same journal Mr. Whitlow now held a photocopy of, sealed in evidence, standing at the front of that church.
She hadn’t told Terrence about the threatening messages. She’d told her lawyer.
“In the event of my death occurring under any circumstances my family considers suspicious,” Mr. Whitlow read aloud, his voice steady even as gasps rippled through the pews, “I want this journal entered into the record, and I want my sister, Mikayla Sinclair, to know that I was afraid of someone. I want the police to look again.”
Terrence stood up so fast his chair scraped against the floor. “This is insane. Everyone’s looking at me like I did something. I loved my wife.”
“You brought your girlfriend to her funeral,” I snapped, finally standing, my father’s hand no longer strong enough to hold me down.
Vanessa’s face had gone pale and rigid beside him. She said nothing. I would think about that silence for weeks afterward.
At 50 percent of this story — if you had been standing in that church with me — you would have believed exactly what I believed walking out of it that day.
I believed Terrence had done something to my sister, or at the very least, that his affair had somehow driven her to her death, that the “someone” in her journal was a warning about a husband capable of far worse than cheating. Piney Ridge believed it too. By the following week, the county sheriff’s department had reopened Layla’s case, reclassifying her death from an accidental fall to an active investigation, and half the town had already convicted Terrence Boone in the parking lot of the Baptist church before the first detective even knocked on his door.
I want to be honest — I was glad. I wanted him to be guilty. It would have made the shape of my grief so much simpler.
