5 day streak!

(my weekend goal is to review everything I already have written for the upcoming chapters so I can revise and post them!)

All of the evidence was pointing to Chloe Peterson as Pattie Cake, and there were too many coincidences with Clo. 

Both of them had a criminal father who went to jail the same year.  Clo had seemed believable when she told me her dad's name was Lester, but as a professional liar, I hesitated to believe her — Lester was also too close to her grandma's name.

And speaking of grandma's, Chloe Peterson's guardian seemed to be her grandma, and Clo admitted several times that she was close to her granny.  Not to mention Clo's grandma died around the same time Winters received the threatening call from Pattie Cake, and right before Clo moved in with Izaak.

And Pattie met Winters shortly after Izaak moved to NYC.

And those piercing, sexy blue eyes.

I'd gotten as much info from Izaak as I could without compromising the case.  I'd asked him enough about Clo's history and he was just too private about that kind of stuff.  As hard to read as Clo herself.  

It was just all adding up.  

Molly's plea came to mind — It seems like you don't have enough against her yet to accuse her.  And the stakes are too high to just turn her in like that without knowing for sure. 

Did I have enough info now?  How much did I need before telling him my suspicions?  Would it even be possible to know without a shadow of doubt? 

I eyed the memory card I'd retrieved from Clo's laptop.  The encryption was beyond my hacking skills, which meant either I could go to Gabe with the connections I'd made, or I could reach out to a contact from Dominic's whose specialty was cracking sophisticated pieces of technology.  

What if it's nothing? I wondered.

Trusting anyone from Dominic's was probably a bad idea, but it was also hard to know how Gabe could react.  Sure, he probably changed over the last 6 years, but how much?  He abandoned me for omitting the truth about my age, when I was only a few weeks shy of eighteen.  I had been pushing his boundaries for weeks and that was the cherry on top, but truthfully, I was still hurt about it.  

And this was much worse — if Clo was Pattie Cake, she'd been lying to Gabe for a month, infiltrated his company, saw Winters face-to-face and still hadn't come clean.  Gabe didn't even really know her like that... at least I had lived with him and was really close to Molly.  I was his actual friend at the time.  Clo was part of our family, but how much did he actually care about her?  

What if Clo ended up in jail and was actually innocent?  And then it was my fault.  Because Clo wouldn't be able to withstand the full weight of Gabe's law firm.  He had more resources than she could ever have, even with Izaak and/or Toby's help.

Does Toby know? I wondered silently, trying again (and failing) to hack into the memory card.

I couldn't tell Gabe.  Not yet.  Instead, I texted my contact from Dominic's requesting a meeting.  He agreed to meet in an hour.

Then I texted Molly.  Still want those addys?

Her response YES! was almost immediate.