Chapter 9: Five Minutes
I kept my voice neutral and pressed the button to add Detective Hargrove to the line.
Her phone rang twice.
She picked up.
I said nothing to signal it.
I just listened.
“I know how this looks,” Derek said.
“I know Audrey is upset.
Teenagers get — they form attachments.
They misread things.” His voice was careful, each word placed with intention.
“The truth is I was trying to be a good friend to your family.
To give her something you and Scott couldn’t — time, attention, someone who took her seriously.”
“Someone who texted her two hundred and eleven times,” I said.
A pause.
Short, but real.
“Some of those texts were coordinating pickups,” he said.
“Some were just checking in.
She’s a kid with a lot going on.
I was being supportive.”
“You told her not to tell us.”
“I told her not to worry you unnecessarily.
That’s different.”
“You coached her on what to say if I showed up, Derek.
I have the text.”
Another pause.
Longer this time.
“Linda.” His voice shifted.
Warmer.
Deliberate.
“I’ve known you for twelve years.
I’ve been in your home.
I care about your family.
I’m asking you — one friend to another — to think about what you’re doing to Audrey by putting her through this.
Police interviews.
Statements.
Lawyers.
A court case.
At sixteen.” He let that sit.
“She told me she’s terrified.
That she doesn’t want any of this to go further.”
There it was.
He was using Audrey against me.
“She told you that when?” I said.
“She texted me last night.”
My chest tightened.
“That’s a lie,” I said.
“I have her phone.”
A longer silence.
“Derek,” I said.
“I know about Renata.”
Nothing for three full seconds.
“I don’t know who—”
“She’s twenty-two now,” I said.
“She was seventeen when you started driving her too.”
His breath changed.
I heard it through the phone — a slight shift, barely audible.
“Whatever she’s told you—”
“She hasn’t told me anything.
The police found her through your phone records.” I kept my voice even.
“Two hundred and eleven messages to my daughter.
And a near-identical pattern to a seventeen-year-old girl before her.” I paused.
“How many others were there, Derek?”
Silence.
“Walk away from this,” he said finally.
His voice had changed completely.
The warmth was gone.
What was underneath was harder and colder and much more honest.
“Walk away now, and I bury what I know about Scott.
You keep your marriage, your family, your life.
Push this forward, and I make sure everything comes out.
Everything.” A pause.
“Think about Audrey watching her father’s past get dragged through a courtroom.”
“Are you finished?” I asked.
“Linda—”
“Because I want to make sure Detective Hargrove heard all of that.”
Complete silence.
“She’s been on this call since the beginning,” I said.
“I added her when I answered.”
He hung up.
My hands were shaking — not with fear this time.
With something that felt more like the release of a spring held under pressure for too long.
Scott was standing in the doorway.
He’d heard everything.
Detective Hargrove’s voice came back through the phone.
“Mrs.
Callahan, I have the full recording.
The bribery attempt and the threat against your husband’s record — those are serious additional charges.” She paused.
“That was well done.”
“Will it help Audrey?” I asked.
“Significantly,” she said.
I set the phone down.
Scott crossed the kitchen in four steps and put both arms around me.
I let him.
We stood in our kitchen like two people holding each other up in a current that was finally, slowly, starting to ease.
“It’s not over,” I said into his shoulder.
“No,” he said.
“But it’s turning.”
Upstairs, I could hear Audrey moving around in her room.
A drawer opening.
The sound of her music — quiet, not the bold practice tracks she used to play, but something softer.
Something she was listening to just for herself.
She didn’t know yet what had happened in the last hour.
I would tell her what she needed to know.
Not all of it.
But enough.
Tomorrow, Detective Hargrove told us when she called back that afternoon, Derek would be brought in for formal questioning.
His attorney would be present.
Renata had agreed to give a full recorded statement.
The case was no longer just Audrey’s word against a man who’d known her since childhood.
It was a pattern.
And patterns, Detective Hargrove said, are what prosecutors need most.
That night, I knocked on Audrey’s door.
“Come in,” she said.
I sat on the edge of her bed.
She was cross-legged on top of the covers, earbuds half in.
“How are you doing?” I asked.
She thought about it.
“Tired,” she said.
“But kind of — lighter?
Is that weird?”
“Not even a little,” I said.
She looked at me for a moment.
“Is it going to be okay?”
I reached out and tucked a piece of hair behind her ear the way I’d done since she was three.
“Yes,” I said.
“It’s going to be okay.”
She leaned her head against my shoulder.
We sat there for a while in the quiet, my daughter and I, while the house settled around us and the hardest part of what was coming still lay ahead — but, for the first time in weeks, slightly less heavy than before.
