The Darkest Corners Read Online Free

baby teeth out of my mouth when he got sick of watching me wiggling them.
    Gram probably expected me to say that I missed my mom or Joslin, but the truth was, I’d already accepted that they were both gone. Callie was all I had left, and Maggie couldn’t even get her on the phone with me.
    “Yeah?” Callie’s voice is low, slightly husky. Nothing like I remember. There’s the sound of something being tossed onto the couch in the foyer—a purse, probably—and her footsteps fade into the kitchen.
    I grip the banister. This is ridiculous. I can’t hide in the guest room for two days.
    I tiptoe down the stairs. Maggie and Callie are murmuring in the kitchen. I pause in the foyer, with the sinking feeling that they’re having a conversation I wouldn’t have been invited to.
    I catch pieces of it. Maggie’s voice. “…know it’s hard for you. She didn’t have anywhere else to go.”
    “We’re not a halfway house, Mom.” Callie’s voice. It’s angry.
    I turn to head back upstairs. The living room floor creaks underneath me. There’s a loaded silence in the kitchen.
    “Tessa, honey?” Maggie sounds nervous. “Is that you?”
    Crap.
I squeeze my eyes shut. “I just needed a glass of water.”
    Maggie appears next to me in the living room. “Oh, of course. I’m glad you came down, because guess who’s home?”
    She leads me through the archway. Callie looks up from the table. She’s in a green East Stroudsburg University sweatshirt, her honey-brown eyes smudged with day-old eyeliner. She’s beautiful, in a way that always made me feel like something that crawled out from a sewer.
    Callie meets my gaze, the color draining from her face. And in that moment I see myself exactly how she sees me: Tessa Lowell, her embarrassing, white-trash childhood friend.
    The reminder of the year of her childhood that was taken away by the trial.
    Maggie looks from her daughter to me. Her eyes are red. I picture her sneaking off when we got home from the prison to have a good cry about seeing Tim Edwards.
    “I’m so glad you girls finally get to spend some time together,” Maggie says.
    Callie snorts. “Yeah, because I
definitely
asked for this.”
    She gets up and pushes her chair in. She’s gone before the shock on Maggie’s face morphs to anger. Maggie turns to me, her expression strained.
    “Tessa, I’m so—”
    “It’s okay,” I say. “Really.”
    Maggie reaches for my hand and squeezes it. “I need to pick up a few things from the supermarket, if you want to come.”
    I shake my head and make an excuse about wanting to lie down, then head up to the guest room. I sit on the edge of the bed, palms on my knees, until I hear the front door shut. And then I hurry downstairs to the family room, where the computer is.
    I’ve typed his name so many times that my fingers have memorized the strokes; they’re ready once they find the keyboard.
    Wyatt Stokes.
He’s not in the news often anymore, but the latest article is from last week. It’s one I must have missed between picking up all the extra shifts to make my second tuition deposit in time.
JUDGE GRANTS MOTION TO HEAR NEW EVIDENCE IN WYATT STOKES APPEAL
    I knew that he was appealing, of course. Stokes fired his first defense attorney right after he was sentenced, and replaced him with Tim Edwards. After years of trying to overturn his conviction, a judge denied Stokes a new trial, saying the first was fair enough. But Edwards said he’d take the appeal to the highest court.
    This always happens, but nothing ever comes of it,
my mother explained when I was worried that Stokes would get out and come after Callie and me for testifying against him. Back before I knew that, guilty or innocent, no one goes down without a fight.
    I skim the article, but it doesn’t say what the new evidence is. Doesn’t say when the new hearing will be. It could be years; death row inmates have nothing but time. Until the day they don’t.
    There’s a clenching in my gut, hard