“Close enough,” I said.
“And yet,” Veronica Ramira said, unblinking, “you still thought you saw Roger.”
“Only for a second,” I repeated with a certain measure of relief, thinking her strategy at last had been revealed. If this was all she had, I could handle it. “And then I got my bearings and realized I did not recognize the person after all.”
Veronica Ramira followed up swiftly: “What was your relationship to Roger Yul?”
The low-level fluttering in my stomach intensified, but I answered quickly too, not wanting to be seen as stalling. “He was a friend. He was a member at the same fraternity as my boyfriend, and he and Denise dated on and off for years.”
“So you spent a lot of time with him?”
“Roger was in the mix. We found ourselves in the same place, hanging around the same people, fairly often.”
“But never alone?”
Here was where I faltered. “N-no. Of course not. We didn’t spend time alone.”
Veronica Ramira said dubiously, “You’ve never been alone with Roger before?”
“I’m sure there were times… over the years. When someone went to use the bathroom, maybe, and yes, we were alone for a few minutes.”
“During one of these times,” Veronica Ramira said, “did you and Roger kiss?”
The witness box is precisely designed to be the second-highest prominence in the courtroom, lower than the judge but higher than the jury, meant to convey the importance of the person providing the testimony. An unintentional consequence of this layout is that it provides clear sight lines for the witness—you can see every spectator in the room. In that moment, my eye fell on Mrs. Andora, who looked like she’d just had a religious revelation. I knew what she was thinking—that was why the last breakup was as bad as it was. That was why Denise ended up in the hospital for dehydration.
Veronica Ramira’s voice cut like a knife. “I asked if you and Roger kissed, Miss Schumacher.”
I needed to see how bad this was, so I was looking at Mr. Pearl when I answered, “He made a move on me once.” Oh, it was bad.
“Did you kiss?”
“He kissed me. And I pushed him off right away. He was very drunk, and I don’t think he even remembered doing it the next day.”
Veronica Ramira smirked as though this was exactly the kind of blame off-loading she expected from a girl who kissed her best friend’s boyfriend. “And it was after that when Denise and he broke up, in the December before the attack, correct?”
“That’s correct. Because I told her what he did. And she was mortified and made me promise not to tell anyone.” I hadn’t, not the detectives and not Mr. Pearl, figuring it didn’t matter, because only two people in the world knew about the kiss, and one of us was dead. I’d assumed Roger had been too drunk to remember, not just because he came at me with the motor functioning of the walking dead, but because when Denise broke up with him in December, she had asked him if he knew why she was ending things for good this time. He had begged her to tell him, and Denise had refused, thinking it would be a harsher punishment for his imagination to run wild. I wouldn’t ever find out how it got back to The Defendant and his team, but at some point, Roger must have come clean. Told someone that he’d played dumb to Denise when, really, he remembered everything.
“I’m sure she was mortified,” Veronica Ramira agreed. “Her best friend and her boyfriend. It must have hurt her a lot.”
I flashed hot at the suggestion that anyone but Veronica Ramira’s client had hurt Denise. “I would never hurt Denise. I loved her.”
“But Denise was upset with you.”
“Denise was upset. But not at me.”
“I thought you said…” Veronica Ramira turned her back on me a moment to rustle around with her notes on the counsel table. The Defendant pushed a few pages forward, and I could tell by the way his eyes flicked upward and the smile that appeared on his face that Veronica Ramira had smiled at him first. “Thank you, counsel,” she said to him before turning back around with her memory refreshed and the gloves off. “You made an early statement to Sheriff Cruso that there had been a bit of a strain between you and Denise at the time she died.”
A sickly bead of sweat escaped the band of my bra, rolled with a bowler’s aim down the knobby lane of my spine. It could not have been more than sixty-six man-made degrees in the courtroom, and I was freezing. “I did say that,” I admitted. “But that had to do with me being president. Sometimes she thought I was bossy.”