God Only Knows (10 page)

“All I’m saying,” Maxwell continued as they arrived at her car, “is that I’ve talked to them a lot about what you’re doing,
and their eyes are opening. I’d like to get them formally involved in this effort, Julia.”

Sighing, Julia opened her driver’s-side door and squinted at Maxwell in the dark. “Well . . . you and I seem to be getting
along okay, so how bad can those two be? Tell them they’re welcome to join next week’s meeting.”

Maxwell raised a finger toward Julia, a weary smile on this face. “Thanks. You won’t be sorry.” He snapped his fingers suddenly,
startling Julia as she climbed into her seat. “I’ve got it.”

Peering up at Maxwell, she frowned. “What’s that?”

“Maybe we should thaw the ice first with a social outing,” he replied. “I hang out with the guys and their wives a couple
of times a month. Why don’t you join us sometime? We’ll probably do a movie and dinner this weekend or next.”

What?
Julia hoped the snap of her neck wasn’t visible. A shaky hand on her keys, she started the ignition and grabbed her door
handle with the other. Eyes facing the dashboard, not Maxwell, she tightened her spine as she said, “I should really get going.
Good night.”

I
n one form or another, Marcus and Julia’s initial responses to Cassie’s revelation boiled down to exactly what she had feared:
You should have told us sooner.

Understandably, Marcus was more taken aback than Julia. As they sat around the glass table in the Gillettes’ morning room,
Cassie’s husband folded his arms, his tongue lodged at the front of his closed mouth. “Why am I only now hearing all this,
Cassie?” He turned toward Julia, who was to his right. “I love you, Julia, you know that, but once again I’m learning about
secrets you and my wife have kept from me. Why are you here now, when this should be a private conversation between Cassie
and me?”

“Baby, please,” Cassie replied, rising and standing over Marcus. “I didn’t have the strength to relive this separately with
the two of you.” She leaned over and kissed the top of his head. “I had to get it all out at once —the past and the present.
Can you forgive me?”

“If it helps, Marcus,” Julia said, her arms crossed and her gaze respectfully focused on the floor, “none of the people in
our lives have known about this up until now.”

“Except for Toya’s brother, apparently.” Marcus shook his head, looking frustrated with himself. “For the record, I don’t
really care if anyone else told their husbands or boyfriends. I care that my wife didn’t tell me, even when we were fighting
for the very survival of our marriage.”

“What purpose would it have served?” Cassie leaned over, resting against her husband’s strong back and draping her arms over
his shoulders. “Our problems had nothing to do with this.”

“I’m not so sure,” Marcus replied, holding his wife’s hands lovingly, though his tone was cool. “You told me about Gil Darby,”
he said, nodding at Julia as if to ensure his wife’s best friend knew that piece of treacherous history. “Why not this?”

Julia opened her mouth, then shut it so quickly —only Cassie caught on. Her outspoken, occasionally bossy friend was stifling
herself, struggling to be more fly-on-the-wall observer than unsolicited therapist.

“Marcus, no one could ever prosecute me for being assaulted by Gil,” Cassie said, her mouth nearly pressed flat against her
husband’s cheek. “This situation with Eddie was totally different, so complex.”

Marcus sighed, his eyes moving between his wife and Julia, and Cassie could feel the motors whirring inside his perceptive
mind. “You’re right,” he replied, gently letting go of Cassie’s hands and rising from his chair. Stuffing his hands into the
pockets of his dress slacks, he stepped to the nearby bay window and took a seat against the sill. “Maybe we’ll pay another
marriage counselor’s kid’s way through college as a result of all this, but I guess that’s a separate matter.” He nodded toward
Julia. “Right now, let’s the three of us sort out what to do about this mess.”

Cassie blew a kiss toward Marcus. “Thank you.”

“Oh, you can do that and more later,” he replied, grimacing and running a hand over his face. “I do need to hear some constructive
ideas, ladies, because my flesh has the simplest answer: Take a Holy Spirit vacation and snap this Whitlock fool’s neck.”

Julia looked up, her hands tented and her eyebrows raised. “I feel you, Marcus,” she said, “but as we all know now, following
the flesh led to the problem we now face.”

Marcus stroked his beard. “I have to be honest with both of you,” he said, glancing between them. “I’m not sure I understand
how
you
kept from confessing to whatever happened long before now, Julia. No offense meant, but Cassie’s and my faith is a little
more practical than yours, if you know what I mean.”

“Yes, I am a ‘pie in the sky’ fanatic,” Julia replied, chuckling faintly. “I love you too, Marcus.”

“Stop being offended,” he said as Cassie joined him on the windowsill, “and answer my question.”

“I was a kid, just like Cassie, Toya, and Terry, that night,” Julia said, her eyes on the table as she seemingly searched
her memory. “We all did what made sense to a bunch of terrified thirteen-year-olds. We kept our mouths shut.”

Cassie asked a question that she realized she’d never actually voiced. “But, Julia, once you got into college and everything,
as your faith and maturity in God grew, you never felt led to confess or make restitution?”

Julia nodded. “I know what you mean. For a long time, as a single woman, I didn’t have as much to protect as you did. I think
that’s why I did feel led to consider confessing, in some manner that wouldn’t affect the rest of you. This was about ten
years ago.”

“Uh-oh,” Marcus said. “That had to be around the time you met Mario.”

Julia suppressed a frown at her ex-husband’s name. Her investment banker ex had swept into her life with such sudden flash,
he had literally seemed heaven-sent. “I didn’t realize you were tracking my life’s timeline so closely, Marcus,” she said,
working hard for her chuckle this time. “Yes, the long and short is, I put God’s call of confession on hold when Mario swept
me off my feet. I told myself that telling the truth about Eddie could wait. I mean, how often did fine, wealthy Christian
black men take such an interest in me?”

Cassie tensed, instinctively hating any time her friend spoke of herself in such unflattering terms. “Stop it now, you hear
me?”

“Never mind,” Julia said. “The short answer is yes, I did nearly confess at one point.”

“Confess
what
?” Marcus stood from the windowsill, checking his watch. “I don’t have all day here —Cassie and I need to change and get ready
for a visit from another football scout who’s coming to interview M.J.; then we have to scoot and pick up the twins. If we’re
going to figure out God’s will regarding this psychopath and his poor brother, I need to know exactly what happened between
you and this boy.” Planting his feet, Marcus cast an inquiring stare between the two lifelong friends. “All you’ve said is
that Whitlock’s right, that you were involved in his brother’s injuries. What does that mean?”

Julia stood now, walking first to hug Marcus and then walking over to Cassie. “Your hubby just asked the million-dollar question,
didn’t he, sweetie?”

Cassie blinked, wrestling with a touch of confusion. “What do you mean?”

All traces of emotion had disappeared from Julia’s face. “Pretend you’re being interrogated by a legitimate policeman, not
Whitlock,” she said. “Tell me, in chronological fashion, Mrs. Gillette, exactly how we all wound up playing a part in Eddie’s
injuries that night.”

Cassie started, then said, “I’m not sure where to begin.”

“Okay, simple question. Describe the last few minutes of the fight we had with him. Who hit him, kicked him, punched him,
or used any weapon against him? What types of injuries did he sustain?”

“I —I just remember shouting, shoving, a lot of blood. . . .” Cassie was embarrassed to realize she had started chewing a
fingernail. Popping it from her mouth, she glanced toward Marcus before saying, “How do you remember it, Julia?”

“This is the problem,” Julia said, placing an arm around Cassie’s shoulders and turning toward Marcus. “If I was put in front
of a policeman today, I’d be up a creek. Cassie and I haven’t talked about that night in detail for nearly twenty years.”
Cassie was shocked to see tears forming in her tough friend’s eyes. “Sis,” Julia said as she faced her friend, “we have to
tell the truth now. God didn’t allow Whitlock to surface just for us to give in to flesh and play his games. We only have
one option: Rob him of his power by going to a legitimate police detective and telling the truth. And with his two-week deadline
ticking, we better get started.”

“How do we tell the whole truth?” Cassie replied, her posture weakening at the very thought. Sensing Marcus’s sudden movement
as he stepped to the other side of the two friends and slipped an arm around his wife’s side, she continued. “Julia, you already
made the point. We’ve all repressed our memories so much —at this point, God only knows what happened that night. We start
telling different stories to the authorities, we could all lose everything.”

“Or,” Julia replied, her steely stare sending a bolt of strength through both of the Gillettes, “God’s favor can cover us
if we go in with one united but honest account of what happened.” She reached for both of their hands as she said, “Give me
a few days. It’s time we girls had a reunion.”

A
s their pilot announced the beginning of the plane’s approach to JFK Airport, Julia awoke to find Cassie staring at her. Her
friend was smiling, but her eyes had an odd glow that caused Julia’s eyebrows to rise. “Hey,” she said, her smiling eyes meeting
her friend’s, “what’s up?”

“Nothing really,” Cassie replied, “just thanking God for sending me a friend who sticks closer than a sister.” Cassie winked
at her own paraphrase of Scripture. “I’m still amazed that you pulled this off.”

Julia coughed and reached to draw some hand sanitizer from her purse. “Well, don’t start writing a song in my honor just yet.
We haven’t solved a single thing yet, sister girl.”

Julia had drawn on plenty of Holy Spirit power to convince both Toya and Terry that it was in their respective best interests
—not just for the general cause of justice —to meet with her and Cassie today, but she still had no idea how to ask for the
ultimate sacrifice from these women. She was no more eager than she imagined they were to risk everything —family, reputation,
even personal freedom —to right something that was not an unquestioned wrong.

“I hear your warnings,” Cassie said, tapping Julia on the hand, “but I hope, like me, you are praying for a miracle here in
New York City.”

“Oh, we won’t be going into Manhattan or anything,” Julia said. The only reason they were flying all the way to New York was
because of Toya’s stubbornness.

“Listen, I will meet with you,” she had finally said at the end of her frosty phone call with Julia, “but you’re asking an
awful lot to make me do this in person. I can pretty much fly free, using George’s frequent-flier miles,” she said, referencing
her husband’s world travels, “but that means I’ll be flying Delta and I’m not doing
any
connections once I come into the States.”

“So what does that mean?” Julia had asked, her teeth grinding in annoyance.

“The best flights are those that take me straight from Paris into JFK Airport,” Toya said, her tone dripping with a toxic
combination of annoyance, impatience, and dread. “If you all can meet me there, I’ll agree to the meeting. And for the record,
we’ll need to be efficient; I’ll be looking to board a return flight within three hours from my arrival.”

“I don’t care if we just meet at Toya’s plane’s airport gate,” Cassie said, downplaying the significance of Toya’s selfishness.
“This
has
to work, Julia, do you understand me? I cannot get back onto this plane tonight without an agreement that we’re all confessing
to what happened.” She failed to fight a shudder at the thought. “Whitlock is waiting on me, do you understand? And if I don’t
steal his motivation, if I let him keep coming after my family, it’s just a matter of time before Marcus or, God forbid, M.J.
gets caught up in all this.”

“You’ve already done right by Marcus, stop worrying about your husband.” Julia felt her back tense as she looked out the window.
The plane was in the initial stages of its descent. “Now that Marcus is up to speed on everything, he knows we have the situation
under control. If anything, he’s less likely to get in the middle of things as a result.”

“Don’t bet on that.” Cassie grabbed Julia’s hand. “Marcus is giving us time to
prove
we have it under control. If he’s not convinced quickly, trust me, he will step in.”

“Calm down,” Julia whispered, coaxing Cassie to lower her voice as the plane’s wheels bounced against the runway once, twice,
then a third time. “One step at a time, girl, one step at a time.”

“Easy for you to say,” Cassie said, voice back at a reasonable level, but still a little shrill even to her own ears. “You’re
not trying to keep a hotheaded teenager out of all this. I tried to talk to M.J. again this morning before I left the house,
Julia. It was a train wreck.”

Julia frowned. “How’s that? I thought you were going to let Marcus run interference with him.”

“Yeah, well,” Cassie said, sucking her teeth, “that was before M.J. told Marcus he has no ‘moral authority’ over him anymore.”

“Where’d he get that idea?” Julia did a quick calculation of how Cassie’s son and husband compared physically. Even though
M.J. had youth on his side, he was still shorter and lighter than his father, who had lettered in both high school and college
as a football linebacker.

As the plane taxied toward its gate, Cassie shook her head, eyes trained on her own lap. “Well, I guess when a nearly grown
boy sees his father committing adultery, he’s entitled to get an attitude.”