There are a very limited number of sentences I have heard in my life that have made my heart stop completely. Very limited. Very.

But let me tell you: hearing two of them in the same day—nay, the same hour—isn't good for your health.

This is about to be a wild ride, just so you know. I'm not trying to hype anything up that shouldn't be hyped up, but there it is. Because when Leo Lutz took me down the rabbit hole that was Hank Wilcox, I had no way of knowing what was about to hit me. I didn't get a warning. So you do.

This is a short introduction to this next part, because I don't know what else to say about it. All I know is that it's my job to tell you about all of this. It's my job to put it out there, right? Because in a way...it kind of happened to me. It's kind of my story. And the people whose story it actually is...they won't tell it.

Here we go.

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Rebecca started coughing.

It wasn't a fake cough. It wasn't one of those coughs that you did when you were trying to cover up the fact that you were laughing when you weren't supposed to be laughing. It wasn't one of those coughs you did as a signal to someone else. It wasn't one of those coughs that you did when you were trying not to be awkward in front of someone, but you really didn't have anything more to add to the conversation.

It was one of those coughs that you did when you forgot to breathe for a total of seventeen and a half seconds, and your chest was reminding you that it needed air to function.

She coughed for at least seventeen and a half more seconds, until the coughing turned into the kind of coughing you do when you're about to puke. Because Rebecca Eaves was about to puke. Rebecca Eaves was about to puke, pass out, stop breathing, and die, all at the same time.

"You good?" Leo asked, leaning forward in his seat in alarm when the coughing turned to dry heaving, "Do you need some water?"

Rebecca shook her head quickly, calming her body back down. She was fine. She was fine. She was going to be totally and completely fine.

She stared at Leo Lutz in silence until he spoke again, almost forgetting what his initial question had been until he repeated it.

"Rebecca, what can you tell me about Hank Wilcox?"

Rebecca heard the question again and quickly reminded herself to breathe. That was important. Breathing. Breathing was important. Otherwise she would probably start coughing again.

"I don't understand the question." She finally replied. Slow, measured, low-pitched. She didn't trust people with high-pitched voices, so whenever Rebecca was lying about something, she made her voice noticeably lower than usual. To offset her own personal biases. "Who is Hank Wilcox?"

Leo grinned slightly, a lopsided grin that would have been cute if he were twenty years younger than he was. Rebecca placed him at mid-forties, although she was usually terrible at guessing ages. She would probably have gauged herself at thirty if she were meeting herself for the first time.

"You realize that you aren't in any trouble, right?" He asked as one of the uniformed officers came back with a bottle of water for Rebecca, "You can answer my questions."

"If I'm not in any trouble, why did I get hauled in here, to a police station in a city I don't live in, in the middle of a Saturday, to talk to a PI?" Rebecca asked, taking a sip of the water to cool her throat, "I feel like you're lying, Mr. Lutz."

"You can call me Leo." He replied, leaning back again in his seat, "You were asked to come in here because I asked for it. I knew where you'd be today because I've been tracking you for some time now, Miss Eaves." He tilted his head to the side slightly and Rebecca felt as if she were an exhibit in a zoo, being stared at by a curious child, "You can answer my questions, or you can leave. But if you choose the latter, you're going to end up in trouble. If you choose the latter, you'll be 'hauled in here' on violation of your own free will, with an arrest warrant scratched onto your permanent record. If you choose the latter, you'll have to hire a lawyer and let your parents know about your court date. If you choose the latter, you won't get to hear the story of how the past six months have led to this moment, with us talking, right here."

Rebecca shut her mouth quickly, deciding against thinking of a witty response. She didn't want an arrest on her record. She didn't want to hire a lawyer. And she sorely wanted to know how the past six months could have led to that moment, with them talking, right there...because she had only known Kennedy for two.

"You're choosing the former. That's great." Leo grinned as Rebecca stayed in her seat, "So, Rebecca, tell me...what do you know about Hank Wilcox?"

Rebecca cleared her throat quietly.

"I know that he was killed a month or so ago." She replied, "I read about it. My friend posted the article on Facebook. He was a motivational speaker or something."

Leo waited for her to continue, but she didn't.

"Alright." He nodded, "Good start. I was hoping for a little more, but I guess...that means it's my turn."

He cracked his knuckles slowly, one at a time, waiting for the tension in the room to rise before launching into what Rebecca presumed to be a lengthy story; one filled with him explaining exactly how he knew everything that the two girls had done, and how Rebecca was surely being shipped off to a maximum security prison within the hour.

"I was hired by Elizabeth Wilcox to find out what happened to her husband." Leo began, "She loved him deeply, and she was completely heartbroken after his death. I advised her against issuing out such a large reward in return for information on her husband's killer, but she was insistent, so I let it happen. We got so many fake tips in those first few days that I had almost completely lost hope of finding whoever was heartless enough to leave a man dying on the side of the road.

"So, I decided to ignore the tips completely. I didn't want them clouding my judgment, as all of them were completely fake. No one saw this accident. No one knew anything about what had happened. People were just looking to capitalize off of this woman's grief in any way possible. Instead of going through the thousands of fake tips hoping for a payday, I went a different route: I decided to start from the beginning. Before the accident happened. I wanted to know about Hank's background.

"So, I talked to Elizabeth. She was cold at first and didn't want to open up, but eventually I got her talking. She talked about their marriage and their kids and how everything about their lives had been picturesque. Until he started having an affair."

Rebecca's eyes widened involuntarily.

"So wouldn't she be your prime susp—"

"That would be nice, wouldn't it?" Leo shook his head, "But no. She had an airtight alibi for the night that it happened, with multiple witnesses and her home security camera placing her inside their house at the time of the murder."

Rebecca nodded.

"Oh. That's nice."

Leo grinned and continued on with his story.

"She told me that the night Hank died, the two of them had argued when he said he had to leave the house at that time of night. She accused him of going to meet his mistress, which he didn't explicitly deny, and he left the house while both of them were angry with each other. He doesn't come home all night, and the next thing she hears is that he's dead.

"Now, Hank Wilcox was rich. He made millions off of his speeches and books and merchandise. Rich people do stupid things. Hank Wilcox had a private credit card that only he had access to...until this investigation, when I was given access to its records. I wanted to dig into this affair, I wanted to know who this other woman was...because she could easily turn into my next prime suspect."

Rebecca nodded. She had no idea what this had to do with her. She had never slept with a married guy. She had never slept with a guy named 'Hank' in the first place. She wasn't the mistress, so she couldn't be the prime suspect, and yet she was the one sitting in the interrogation room with the private investigator.

"Hank didn't use his private credit card all that much. He hardly ever used it, in fact, until September 2019, when he started using it almost exclusively. He used it regularly, on dinners and gifts and jewelry, until May 2020, four months before he died. This leads one to think that his affair lasted from September 2019 to May 2020, which means it ended. But Elizabeth swore he had left the house to visit his mistress at the end of September of 2020, so...perhaps they were reconciling.

"A scorned mistress is a great suspect, for the record. Almost always the ones who do it. But how to find this mistress? I went with the stereotypes: she was probably younger than him, more attractive than him, and poorer than him. A college student, perhaps, since he spoke at colleges frequently. Two days before he started using his private credit card with some regularity, Hank Wilcox spoke at an event at Clemson University."

Rebecca didn't want her mind to go where it immediately went, but she couldn't help it. She didn't sleep with Hank Wilcox. But that didn't mean her newfound frenemy didn't.

"562 people attended that event in September. That was far too many people to find the mistress, and I figured he probably didn't meet her at the event itself. Perhaps they met at a bar or restaurant after the event. Judging from a combination of all of his credit cards, Hank went to a bar near Clemson after the event. So I pulled the other credit card receipts from that night. Two of them matched people who had been at Hank Wilcox's speech just hours earlier: a George Fulmer and a Kennedy Abrams."

Rebecca had to consciously remind herself not to pass out. She couldn't pass out. She had to sit there. And listen to the rest of this terrible story.

A/N: Happy Memorial Day to my American readers! AND, it's only one more week until Restricted (AKA Three's Company Part 2) is released in print!! Follow my blog and my Instagram to learn more, and to be kept up-to-date on everything...there's a giveaway that will happen soon!

-Katherine