“Going to make a damn fine lawyer someday.” The pride in his voice turned the remembrance bittersweet.
Her father had just made deputy district attorney when she’d told him she wasn’t going on to law school after receiving her undergraduate degree. Instead she’d applied for, and had been accepted into, the FBI Academy.
She’d told him that she still intended to put her pre-law studies to good use, but in law enforcement. Mallory had explained that she had a hard time seeing herself stuck behind a desk for the next thirty years.
She’d always been a serious tomboy, with no time for boys, at least not in the boyfriend and girlfriend way—she’d been too busy competing with them both academically and physically. Despite that, she’d always had more male friends than female friends in high school and college. She just found it easier to relate to men. More often than not, her male friends considered her one of the guys, and she’d come to accept that that made her a better friend than girlfriend.
These days she had very few friends of either sex, though she still preferred the company of men—to a point. Because by both male and female agents she’d forever be known as that rookie whose brother-in-law murdered her sister. The one who pulled her gun and then fainted.
She’d spent most of the past seven years behind a desk, constantly passed over for promotions. But it turned out to be in the best interest of the two most important men in her life, and she couldn’t regret that. Putting herself in the line of fire and leaving her father alone and Ben an orphan was not an option.
Being a single parent came with its own set of rules and responsibilities.
More recently, however, she’d made her own opportunities and finally felt as if she’d put the past behind her. She’d become part of an evidence recovery and processing team.
It might not be the job of her dreams, but at least she found her work interesting and maintained special agent status. This also meant she did a lot more fieldwork these days and carried a badge and a firearm again, which Ben thought was kind of cool and she found comforting.
Goose bumps raised the hairs on her arms, and she shivered.
“Are you cold, Daddy?” She tucked the lap blanket around him.
“Cold, no. I’m not cold.” He took a moment to assess his surroundings. “Maybe a little.” He amended his answer.
Mal lost track of time as the afternoon sun faded into evening and the temperature dropped. A slight breeze blew through the umber and gold trees with their scattered leaves. The afternoon sun had warmed their earthy fragrance and she breathed in the crisp, clean scent as it clung to the evening air.
Halloween was just around the corner. Exactly one week from today.
She must remember to stop by the grocery store on her way home for the pumpkin she’d promised Ben.
Taking the remnants of stale bread from the bag inside her purse, she handed a slice to her father. They took turns tossing bits and pieces into the water. Whenever the honks died down, one or the other of them would toss out another bit of bread for the geese to clamor over.
Her dad used to take her and Cara to Wash Park—Washington Park—to feed the geese on days just like this.
If he had to be lost in his memories, she figured that would be a nice one to get lost in.
While it often felt as if she and her dad were having two different conversations, every once in a while they connected over something as simple as the weather and a flock of geese.
Brushing the crumbs from her lap, Mallory reached out to her father and just sat holding his fragile hand in hers. She listened to the familiar nuances in his voice while he talked as if she were away, studying pre-law at Colorado University in Boulder and her mother and sister were still with them.
Cara married to Nash and living in San Diego.
Their mother having no greater care than tending her rosebushes and vegetable gardens.
After Cara’s death, Margaret Ward had simply given up on life. Even a grandbaby couldn’t bring her back from the brink of despair. She’d needed pills to get up in the morning and then pills to fall asleep at night. She’d died of an overdose shortly after Nash’s conviction.
An accidental overdose. At least that’s what Mallory chose to tell herself...when she wasn’t blaming Nash for her mother’s suicide.
Mallory’s father was made of sterner stuff. Older than his wife by a decade, he’d been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s nine years ago. Charles Ward had stubbornly controlled the onset of dementia with medication and had succeeded in having several lucid years after his diagnosis. Not so much lately, though.
Consigning him to an assisted-living facility, and then later the nursing home, had taken all the fight out of him. But it had been the right thing to do.
Mallory hadn’t been able to care for both her nephew and her father with his deteriorating mental and physical condition. Exhausted from trying, she came to a time when she had no choice.
She couldn’t take an afternoon nap or lie down at night without worrying her father might take the baby out for a walk and leave him somewhere, or give him a bath and then become distracted. Or worse, become confused and frustrated when he heard the baby crying.
Even as a twenty-three-year-old, she’d realized the baby’s safety had to come first.
Otherwise the consequences could have been tragic.
To her surprise, Nash’s mother never contested Mallory’s appointment as Ben’s guardian. Nor her subsequent adoption. Mallory supposed there wasn’t much the woman could do since her son had signed over Ben’s custody to Mallory on that day at Miramar. She tried never to think about that day or the days that followed.
The way Nash attempted to control the tremor in his hand as he signed papers relinquishing his rights as a father and making way for her to adopt his and Cara’s son...
The next day news broke in grizzly detail of Nash hanging himself with bedsheets, following a family visit—a custody hearing in San Diego being the excuse for Nash’s temporary transfer to the Level II facility.
Even though none of it was real, she still found it disturbing, watching the events unfold while she sat holed up in her hotel room. Even though she’d attempted to stay below the radar, the reporters had been relentless in tracking her down, wanting to know what she might have said or done to provoke his actions.
She’d known it was coming. Yet she hadn’t been prepared for the onslaught of questions. “What were Kenneth Nash’s last words to you, Ms. Ward? Did he confess? Did he leave a note? Your mother also committed suicide. Tragic coincidence? Suspicious circumstance? What’s the connection?”
She couldn’t leave the hotel room without microphones being shoved in her face. “How do you feel about the role you played in the arrest and conviction of your own brother-in-law and a decorated war hero? Are you aware your brother-in-law is being buried without ceremony in the Fort Leavenworth Military Prison Cemetery? Will you be attending the funeral, Ms. Ward?”
She’d been as unprepared for those questions as she had been for the profound feeling of loss that accompanied them. Another part of her had died that day. She’d lost her sister, her mother and to some extent her father.
What more did she have to lose?
Nash had taken everything that was youthful and innocent about her and destroyed it, irrevocably changing her and the direction of her life at twenty-two.
And yet she’d still mourned the brother-in-law she’d once known.
For a long time afterward, she felt as empty as the wooden crate lowered to the ground with nothing more substantial than sandbags to weight it down—assuming they’d weighted down his casket with sand. They could have interred an unidentified body for all she knew.
Cremation