"We need to talk, yeah, those are the best words a girl wants to hear...sure. Let's talk."

He strolled into the apartment and if I didn't have a diagnosed heart condition I would have forced myself to the doctor the next day with the way it was ricocheting around in my rib cage all willy nilly.

The stormy expression that clouded his features warned me that this was not going to be a happy conversation. He eyed the countless documents spread around my apartment and while in retrospect it could have seemed as if I were being a bit obsessive about the details of the case but I had just had a major breakthrough in evidence and I needed all the information around me in order to connect all the dots.

He hardly got his huffed breath out before my phone started going off yet again, probably Layla bugging me about Nate.

I went to grab it on the mountain of case files but Emmett stood up and walked over to grab it for me, inevitably seeing everything that was sprawled out on the couch, probably the crime scene photos too. I cringed, not wanting him to have to see those things, but his focus was mainly on my phone.

"What's wrong?"

He ground his teeth together as his steely glare slapped me in the face.

"Emmett..."

What had he seen on my cellphone?

"Layla wants to know what to do with Nate. Apparently you've been obsessed with getting revenge on him, too? Seems like there's enough men in your life right now, am I not enough? You can only have someone there when you're trying to get them put in prison or a hospital? This is sick, Lydia. I thought you were done with all this shit!"

"Emmett. I only talked to her once a few weeks ago, before I was in the hospital, and after she contacted me again saying she was practically stalking him, I told her to stop and to leave me alone."

"Looks like you talked to her the other day. You know, when you talked to my uncle and lied to me about it?"

My veins filled with ice at his words. He wasn't just angry, no. He was filled with rage, and I was worried that most of it was actually pointed towards me, instead of his uncle which seemed to be the main focus of the conversation.

"I..." I didn't have an excuse for not telling him. I didn't want to add to something else that would hurt him, something else to put on his plate. I figured that he'd call him and they'd figure out their shit together and he wouldn't need to get angry that he had called me too.

But of course those words didn't come out of my mouth as I sat there nervously wringing my hands in front of my body.

"You what? You just thought that you'd lie to me and pull away and sleep over here last night instead of telling me that my family contacted you? Didn't you think I'd want to know that?"

Our phones kept going off over and over again but we kept ignoring them, staring at each other as the vehement anger dripped off of Emmett's glorious body.

"I just didn't want you to have another family member disappoint you. I thought he would call you and you could work it out together, leaving me out of it. All he said was hello to me before my phone died anyway."

He cursed out a few words before pulling at the dark strands of hair on his head, almost like he had to cause himself some kind of physical pain in order to remain somewhat sane for this conversation.

He allowed himself to fall down onto the couch and grabbed my hand as he did so, causing me to fall on top of him and onto his lap. His arms wrapped around me and it seemed as if he thought that if he let go that he thought that he would lose me.

"Talk to me. Tell me what's wrong. I never told Layla to go all crazy stalker on Nate, and if I'm being honest I let go of my resentment towards him after the car crash. I just realized that he wasn't worth it. And I have evidence backing up my Christian theory for my case, so that's not me being paranoid. I'm not putting anyone or anything before you. I love you Emmett, but you need to tell me what's got you all wound up. It's your uncle, but I don't know why or what he did."

Our phones kept buzzing but I ignored mine, unlike Emmett who fished his cellphone out of his front pocket causing me to have to shift a little bit to the side. One look at his face and I could tell that it wasn't anything good.

"What is it?"

"He did it. He really did it, fucking bastard."

"What did he do?"

"I need you to hear me, like really hear me, and I need you to understand everything about to come out of my mouth, can you do that?"

"Yes."

I was suddenly facing him as his deep blue eyes bore into my own, heart racing in my chest as I readied myself to absorb what he was about to tell me. With the way he was acting it was like he was about to tell me he had murdered someone.

"When I was fourteen, I lived with a foster family, and they had a biological daughter who was around my age. We got close and one night, we kissed. Her little brother saw and told her parents what he saw and embellished the story a bit because we were in her room. They thought I took advantage of her, but all we did was kissed. It was my first kiss, hers too. It was all so innocent that what happened next makes me sick.

"Her family pressed charges against me and since I was in the system and had no one to look out for me, I was sent to juvie. The girl tried to tell everyone what had really happened but no one believed her because they said I had brainwashed her against her family or something crazy like that. It was on my record until I turned eighteen and then it was expunged. I was on probation for basically my entire middle and high school life. That's why I focused so hard on football and never had a real girlfriend until after I graduated high school, because I always thought girls were just a distraction, and a dangerous one. I swore that I'd never let anyone distract me like that again...until you came along."

My cheeks heated up as he kept talking and I kept my mouth shut because I wasn't sure where at all this was headed.

"My uncle called and only talked to me for five minutes before asking for money. Before that, he'd sold some of his story to the press and told me that if I didn't pay him off that he'd tell the rest of the story including everything about juvie and what happened to put me there."

My head was swimming with the information he'd just dumped on me.

"What was her name?"

He didn't seem surprised by my first question.

"Julia."

"Julia. Okay, and can you get her to go on the record and tell her side of the story, the correct side that proves that it was all just innocent?"

He stared back at me in awe.

"You don't have anything else, you're just automatically trying to help make sure this doesn't ruin my career? You're not going to question my sincerity on this or anything?"

I sighed and placed my hand in his.

"Emmett...you've been with me through thick and thin. Marnie cheated on you and you helped to put away her abuser despite the way she treated you. You supported me to a point where I wasn't putting myself in immediate danger when it came to putting away Raphael. I know who you are, and you are not an abuser. I don't care what your uncle or the media tries to say, I know that it's not true."

His lips captured mine in a strong embrace that had me swimming in a puddle of my own emotions and my hands wrapped around his neck, bringing the two of us closer together.

"I'm sorry for what I said earlier when I came in, I was just so angry and upset and seeing all of that on the table made me think you were getting too wrapped up in something that wasn't going anywhere."

I rested my forehead against his and allowed a ghost of a smile spread across my face.

"It's okay, I know you're under a lot of stress right now, and now all of this is piling up. I have the evidence I need, and while it's circumstantial I can get it to my professor and she can take it through the right channels to the police and hopefully they can get a search warrant and maybe find the murder weapon, who knows. My work here in getting her defendant off is pretty much done, no prosecutor will feel justified taking him to court with no motive and no murder weapon, why they even chose him as a suspect aside from being in the wrong place in the wrong time is beyond me."

I scrunched my eyebrows at Emmett's goofy smile.

"What?"

"You're so beautiful when you talk like a lawyer."

I was about to dive back under the waters of a kiss from Emmett Scott but Amalia nudged open her bedroom door and rolled out, a deer in the headlights look on her face.

"Oh god, I interrupted something, didn't I?"

We laughed her off but turned somber when we remembered everything we had ahead of us. His hand encircled mine and squeezed it tightly, the words left unspoken because they didn't need to be proclaimed.

We were going to be okay. Everything was falling into place, and soon the obstacles to our happiness together would be eliminated and then there would be nothing but peace.

And damn if I couldn't wait until that day.