“Where was your dad through all of this?”
“I’m not sure. They divorced before I was a year old. Mom told him he wasn’t my real father, but there’s never been anyone else in her life that I’m aware of.”
“You didn’t get tested, to find out if the man was your father?”
Audrey kept thinking that she’d stop the conversation. Right after the next sentence.
But something about Detective Ryan Mercedes compelled her to talk to him. She’d never met anyone like him. Such a mixture of idealism and rigid determination. He was a man you could count on to protect the tribe. But one with a heart, as well.
“He wasn’t interested in proving anything,” she said.
“Did you ever see him?”
“Nope. I don’t even know what he looks like. I wrote to him once, when I was in high school, but the letter came back with a big ‘return to sender’ on the front. My mother said it was his handwriting.”
“And she never told you who your father really was?”
It did sound rather fantastic, now that she heard her story aloud. Audrey was so used to that part of her circumstances, it seemed normal to her. And in her line of work, representing children whose rights were in jeopardy, she regularly saw familial situations that were much more dysfunctional than hers had ever been.
“I’ve always assumed that the man listed on my birth certificate, the man she was married to, was my father. My mother has a way of changing the truth to suit her in the moment. She uses words to lash out and hurt when she’s hurting, but I don’t think she’d have been unfaithful to her marriage vows.”
“He must have known that.”
“Probably. But she uses people’s vulnerabilities against them until she breaks them down to the point where they’ll agree with her just to get some peace. I’m guessing she hit him where it counts one too many times.”
Audrey sat forward. She’d said too much. Far too much.
“Nice guy, to leave his kid all alone with that woman.”
“He paid child support, every single month, until I turned eighteen.”
“Like money was going to make you happy? Protect you?”
Life was black and white to Ryan. There was right and wrong. Good and bad. You chose the right. Righted the wrongs. Served good and obliterated the bad.
A characteristic that had drawn her to him from the beginning. The world needed more of his kind of passion.
She just didn’t want to need it. Not on a personal level.
“Maybe he thought, since I was a girl, her daughter, that there’d be some kind of motherly instinct that would come out in her, protect me from the emotional abuse he must have suffered.”
“Or maybe he sucked as a father.”
Ryan’s words made her smile.
“YOU NEVER DID answer my question.” Ryan wished he’d brought the wine bottle in with him. Wished he could pour another glass for both of them. Keep her on his couch with him.
At least for a time.
Long enough to get to know her well enough to get her out of his system. To dispel the strange and uncomfortable hold she had on him.
Ryan was used to being his own man. He’d been hearing the beat of his own drummer for most of his life. And walked to it alone.
He liked it that way.
He had things to do with his life—lives to save and evils to conquer—and he couldn’t do that if he gave his heart away.
Or at least that was the story he’d been telling himself. If there was another reason, some deep-seated something that prevented him from living the normal life of wife and kids and family, he didn’t want to know about it.
“What question?” Her big brown eyes were mysterious, pulling him into their shadowed depths, as she flung a lock of her long blond hair over her shoulder. She sat on the edge of the couch, as though poised for flight. He wished she’d relax again.
“Why you do what you do.”
“Oh, I thought I had. That’s easy. I spent my childhood feeling powerless,” she said as though that explained it all.
And in a sense, it did. She’d been stripped of something vital as a child. And every day, when she went to work, when her work preserved the dignity and sense of self of even one child, when she protected the innocence of childhood, she took back the personal power she’d lost.
Ryan understood that. Righting wrongs was what made his past, his history, his genealogy conscionable, too.
CHAPTER TWO
AUDREY DIDN’T WAIT around for his call. And only checked her cell phone so many times Sunday evening because she gave the number to all her clients, and if a child needed her, tomorrow could be too late.
It wasn’t Ryan’s fault she’d bared her soul like an idiot the night before. He had no way of knowing she’d shared with him more than she’d ever told anyone.
She’d come across like some pathetic victim, instead of the strong and healthy woman she’d become.
With the hundred-year-old hardwood floors of her Victorian-style cottage shining, she put away the cleaning supplies she’d hauled out and went upstairs to the treadmill. And half an hour later, panting and sweaty, headed across the hall to her home office—the only other room upstairs—and read over her files for the next day.
When everyone else in the world was relaxing, watching television, reading, napping, Audrey worked.
The kids whose lives seemed reduced to files of unfortunate facts, whose parents, for a variety of reasons, were unable to parent effectively, called out to her. They were always calling out to her.
Kaylee Grady. Date of birth, 9/29/04. That made her four years old. Audrey looked through the documents of the new case she had an initial meeting on the following morning.
Kelsey Grady. Date of birth, 9/29/04.
Twins.
Lifting the cover page, she studied the picture underneath. They were identical. Blond. With chubby cheeks—and far too serious eyes. Their parents had been killed in a car accident during a blizzard the previous February. There’d been no will. And the family was fighting over custody. They wanted to split up the girls to satisfy members from both sides.
“Over my dead body.” Audrey’s voice, usually a comfort, sounded loud in the gabled room. Loud and lonely.
And she glanced at the cell phone she’d carried up with her. Nothing. No missed calls. No messages.
She didn’t blame him for not calling.
The cuckoo clock in the family room downstairs of her 1920s, whitewashed home chirped eight times. Not meaning to, Audrey counted every one, and then knew what time it was. A piece of information she’d purposely been denying herself.
It was just that, last night, she and Ryan had crossed into new territory. Hadn’t they?
That of friends, trusted friends. Or something. It wasn’t as though they were kids, playing the dating game. They were mature adults. Getting to know each other. Sharing a moment in time.
A phone call would have been nice. That was all.
HE WAS STILL working the eleven-to-seven shift. Not because he had to—no, Ryan Mercedes had all the right contacts in all the right places, whether he wanted them or not. He was on the night shift for one reason only.
A