Manolo gave me a brief nod and headed towards the door. He was about to leave when he turned to me abruptly. “I think your lawyer just got here.”
“Thank God,” I sighed.
“Hang in there, Phil,” Manolo told me before he left.
I sat there with my head in my hands, cursing the day I met Brent Roberts. The fucker was trying to ruin my life, and if we didn’t get to the truth, then he would succeed, and everything I’d worked so hard to build would be gone.
Then I thought about Megan and realized that never meeting Brent would mean never meeting her. I wondered if that was for the best, especially given how easily she had believed I was guilty.
I thought about it for exactly five seconds and realized that despite everything, I still loved Megan and knowing her was worth meeting Brent.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Megan
“Why do you keep checking your phone so much?” I asked.
“No reason,” Brent said, looking towards the television.
I frowned. We had been together for thirty minutes since Brent walked into the living room and parked himself on the couch and he had checked his phone thirty-three times in that window of time. And that was only after I noticed and started keeping count. Was he waiting to hear news about Phil? And if so, why did he think he would get a text or call about it?
It was eight in the morning, and I had been up since five because I kept dreaming about Phil and jail and falling. It was unusual for Brent to be up this early, though, and I wondered if on some level, he was worried about Phil, too.
“Hey, how come you’re up so early?”
“Just wired,” he said, with a shrug. “And, I went to sleep really early last night.”
“Oh, okay,” I said, accepting his answer, even though he still seemed strange to me.
Again, I watched as Brent checked his phone. “Is something wrong?” I asked. “Because something seems to be on your mind?”
“Uh… I suppose I was just worried about Phil, you know,” he replied. “The guy can be a jerk, but he was my friend.”
“You keep checking your phone,” I pointed out again.
“Yeah… I have a cop friend,” he replied. “I told him to keep me posted.”
“Oh,” I said. “I didn’t know that. What’s his name?”
Brent paused for a second, and I assumed the television had just distracted him. “Steven Rodriguez.”
“No news from him, then?”
“No,” he replied. “I suppose it doesn’t really matter whether we get news or not, right? I mean, Phil’s out of our lives now.”
I sighed inwardly, feeling a deep-seated pain in my heart. “Yeah… I suppose he is.”
“And we’re better off, Meg,” Brent said. “I mean, the guy was no good.”
I shook my head. “That’s the thing… How could he have been no good?” I argued. “He was a firefighter; he actively put himself in danger every day he was at work in order to save other people.”
“It was just a paycheck to him, though,” Brent said.
I frowned. “No, it wasn’t,” I said. “It couldn’t have been. He loved his job; he was so passionate about it every time he spoke about being a firefighter.”
“What he loved about it was the fame and recognition,” Brent said, turning off the TV and looked towards me. “Trust me; I know Phil. I’ve known him a lot longer than you have. He liked the attention, and firefighting gave him the attention he craved. But obviously, the money was not enough for him, which is why he turned to drug dealing. And let’s face it, it’s in his blood.”
“That’s not fair,” I said. “Just because his brother dealt drugs doesn’t automatically make it inevitable that Phil will go down that road, too.”