The Vindicated With The Monstrous

Twenty Three

Normani stared back at her in shock, which only made Taylor squirm more in seat. She shifted uncomfortably before figuring that she'd clarify, "I wrote the letter that you got and well, I'm the anonymous person that paid for you to take the case, I technically stole from my stepmother but she's shit at keeping her finances in check anyway."

"Wow," Normani replied before slowly nodding her head, that makes sense. Normani would have suspected it was her sister that wrote the letter to her if she had known Lauren even had one. "I'm assuming you wanted to stay anonymous because of your stepmom as well?"

"She can't know!" Taylor immediately said, fear in her voice. The fear caused her to ramble on, the words just rapidly spilling out of her mouth, "She can't know that I'm going to try to help Lauren, she doesn't even know that I still talk to Lauren, all the time actually, and Lauren can't know that I'm getting involved either, because Lauren doesn't want Julie to throw me out and cut me off like she did to her!"

Normani watched as Taylor finished, sitting on the chair not breathing heavy and trying to catch her breath. Normani got up and sat down in the chair right next to the young girl, putting her arm around her chair to rub Taylor's shoulder soothingly, "Hey, calm down, sweetie, no one is going to find out. Your secret is safe with me."

Taylor smiled gratefully, "Thank you, thank you so much. I just knew I couldn't sit back and watch Lauren get sent to jail, especially after I spoke to Alexa and she told me about how terrible her last lawyer was."

"You spoke to Alexa?" Normani asked to which Taylor nodded. Her mind was tired and all of this new information was becoming hard to put together, she knew Alexa wasn't alive for very long after that trial that she attended. "That must've been right around the time of her death."

"Yea," Taylor said before biting her lip, she looked down at her fingers to hide her guilt, "I'm sorry for not coming forward about it to the police or anything. But before I went to the police, I knew I had to come to you first."

Normani narrowed her eyes curiously at her, "Why is that?"

"Because of what I promised in the letter to you," Taylor replied before she bashfully admitted, "I was trying to sound really professional in the letter and I also might have lied a bit in it. I'll be honest, I kind of made up the whole thing about having valuable information that was being withheld from the defense part. At the time, I didn't really have any information that I can give you without Lauren realizing it was from me, especially after Alexa's death."

"But now you do?" Normani asked, skeptically.

"Yea, I think I do."

--

It seemed weird to be back in her apartment at a rather early time. Camila realized that for once she wasn't all that tired and she had nothing to do. She looked around at the apartment that she was now going to spend more time in and sighed. It was so empty, almost as if no one had ever been in it, and Camila wasn't alone it's not unusual for single apartments of detectives to look just dull. Camila sat on the couch and felt it was rather depressing though, Lauren's hotel room looked less boring than this.

Camila flicked through the channels on tv for a little until she gave up, it had been forever since she watched tv so none of the shows caught her attention. Camila put the remote down on her coffee table and began walking out of her apartment door. She began walking down the stairs to see what her family was doing. She still lived in her family home, the four of them had the rather big first floor and basement while the top apartment was always rented out, that is until Camila took it after college when she decided that she didn't want to be away from her family just yet.