Her false bravado lost all conviction as she tried to comprehend the bizarre scene playing out in front of her. Her brother-in-law, covered in her sister’s blood, cradled a blue bundle in the palms of his hands.
“Dear Lord, Nash, what have you done?”
Mallory shook her head to clear it. She’d stepped outside for just a moment.
One minute Nash was giving her sister mouth-to-mouth. The next he was ordering Mallory to grab his cell phone from the pack he said he’d left outside the back door. When she couldn’t find his phone, she’d taken those precious extra seconds to grab hers from her rental car parked out front at the curb.
Mallory kicked past an overturned chair and stepped over the cordless phone unit that had been ripped from the wall. Her sister’s still-warm body lay lifeless on the cold tile floor where her brother-in-law had been performing CPR.
Mallory couldn’t remember if she’d punched 911 before dropping her cell phone to reach for her gun. Though only seconds, it seemed like a lifetime ago. She’d initially been willing to give Nash the benefit of the doubt when she stumbled upon him at the center of an obvious crime scene....
Until she watched the Navy SEAL slice the swell of her sister’s belly.
“She’s gone, Mal.” His voice never wavered.
“You have the right to remain silent...”
“There was nothing more I could do for her, except save our son.” Nash dropped his KA-BAR in the puddle of blood.
Sidestepping the slick pool, Mallory still managed to leave the imprint of her sole behind. Biting back the copper tang of panic, she continued to read him his Miranda rights—Article 31 in the military. “Anything you say or do can and will be used against you in a court of law....”
Nash ignored her, concentrated on the little bundle in his arms. He covered the teeny nose and mouth with his own mouth. The tiny concave chest expanded and then contracted with each puff.
“Do you understand these rights as I have read them to you...?”
She couldn’t afford to make another rookie mistake.
Sirens blared in the distance—emergency responders, too late to save her sister. Mallory’s world spun out of control.
The tile floor rushed up to meet her.
CHAPTER ONE
Denver, Colorado
Seven months later
“MUH, MUH...MUH,” Benjamin babbled from his crib.
“Up already?” Mallory carried her coffee into the baby’s room. Strong. Black. A reason to get out of bed at zero dark thirty and make it through another day.
Of course, Benji was the real reason she bothered to set the timer on Mr. Coffee. He pulled himself up to gnaw on the guardrail while bouncing on his tiny toes. He couldn’t walk yet, but he sure gave those chubby baby legs a workout.
“Stop before you knock out a tooth.”
Her words startled him into stopping. He reached for her and fell back on his diaper-padded bottom. “Mama!” he cried with his arms outstretched.
“Say, what—”
“Mama, mama,” he continued to blubber.
“Oh, Benji.” Mallory set her happy face mug on the dresser and lifted her nephew out of his crib. He rewarded her with big tears and baby drool all over her new black suit jacket. “I wish your mama was here, too.”
“Mama,” he insisted, latching on to her nose. How much plainer could it get? Benji wasn’t asking for his mother—Mallory was the only mother he’d ever known.
He didn’t understand that the woman who’d carried him for thirty-six weeks was dead. Benji’s only world was the one Mallory created for him. That’s why she needed to push past her grief and do more than just go through the motions...for both their sakes.
Hugging her nephew tight, Mallory repeated, “Mama, mama.”
Until she almost believed it.
She kept a firm hold on her little wiggly worm while she changed his diaper and then carried him out of her old room. It wasn’t much of a nursery. It wasn’t much of a room, either. She’d pushed her twin bed against one wall and then hauled the old crib down from the attic.
The baby crib was a beautiful piece of heirloom furniture in a rich cherrywood. It was so well crafted that it still met safety standards decades later—she’d checked. Someday she’d bring down the rest of the ensemble and turn the room into a real nursery. Hopefully before Benji grew out of the nursery altogether.
At first, she’d slept in her old room with him.
Now more often than not she fell asleep in front of the TV on the leather sofa in what had once been her dad’s study. She kept her clothes in one huge pile on her parents’ bed, with the intention of eventually moving into their bedroom located across the hall with its en suite bathroom. Though she already showered in the en suite and dressed in the bedroom, she still couldn’t bring herself to clear out the closets.
To her it was still her parents’ room, her parents’ house—the home where she and Cara had grown up. Just passing Cara’s old room next door to hers made Mallory want to cry.
She’d opened the door once.
Everything remained as Cara had left it before going off to college—with the addition of her wedding dress, which had been hanging in a storage bag on the back of the closet door since Cara and Nash’s wedding. It’s where their dad had stashed Cara’s personal effects brought back from San Diego. And where a short while later Mallory had found her mom crumpled in a heap on the bed—an empty pill bottle in her hands—among boxes of Cara’s childhood, college and wedding mementos.
There were more memories in that room than Mallory could handle.
The whole house was haunted by a not-too-distant past. At some point, though, she’d have to find the strength to deal with it and make it her own or put her childhood home up for sale. She simply wasn’t ready to do either.
Mallory carried Benji downstairs to the kitchen, where she settled him into his high chair for breakfast. While making him a bowl of rice cereal with applesauce, she grabbed a carton of yogurt for herself. Shoving aside the stacks of bills and legal papers, she made room at the table so she could sit down to feed him.
One of her father’s colleagues was helping her sort out her family’s financial and legal mess pro bono. Her parents had considerable assets and the foresight to have both wills and living wills. But even they were not prepared for the tragic turn of events that would require shifting power of attorney and property to their younger daughter so soon after their older daughter’s death.
Cara hadn’t owned anything of real value that didn’t also belong to Nash, except for a small burial policy the insurance company refused to pay out because Nash was the sole beneficiary.
And even though Mallory was Benji’s court-appointed guardian, she had a big battle ahead of her in order to gain full custody. Kenneth Nash was still the baby’s father and Benjamin Nash was legally a ward of the state of California until a judge said otherwise.
She couldn’t discount Nash’s family.
His mother, his aunt and uncle, numerous cousins, including a married cousin in New York, had all expressed interest in adopting Benji. And that was just on his mother’s side. But it seemed wrong somehow—disloyal to Cara’s memory—to allow her murderer’s family to raise her son.
Mallory