“What are you doing here?” I ask my best friend.
“I just came to see if you need a real investigator on your baby-snatcher case,” he says.
“You mean a fed taking over?”
“I mean me,” he says with a broad smile.
“While I do enjoy your stellar company,” I respond, “I can’t help but wonder why.”
“Because my badge is prettier?” he asks with a shrug.
“Doubtful.”
“Because I’m more handsome?” he tries.
“Again, no.”
“Because your sister is worried you’re jumping life milestones like an Olympic equestrian?”
“Ding ding ding! We have a winner.” I laugh.
“Fine,” he says like it’s no big deal. “I told her you’d be fine, but she worries.”
“You mean she’s bored and she likes to meddle?” I ask as I slap him on the back.
“Yeah, that exactly.”
“Well, I’d love to have your input,” I tell him honestly. “There’s something about this case that I know I’m missing. I just don’t know what yet.”
“I’m happy to help,” he replies.
“Great. I was just on my way to see Emma for some autopsy results,” I tell him. A strange look passes over his face, but it’s there one second and gone the next. “Well, shall we?”
“Uhh… yeah.”
The door to the morgue is just a reach away, and I know that if I can hear an argument on the other side of the door, so can Wes. I reach for the doorknob, my reaction automatic reaction to jump in and rescue Emma, even if it’s from my sister. But Wes lays a heavy hand on my shoulder to stop me. I look back at him, and he just silently shakes his head. It takes me back to all the times he gave me the same signal in the desert. I trusted him then, and I trust him now, so I wait.
“Don’t you think it’s time to tell him?” Claire asks, her tone pleading, and I wonder what could have these two no-nonsense women so upset.
“I don’t know how,” Emma says. I can’t stand the pain in her voice. My spine straightens when I hear it. She sounds so defeated, and I absolutely hate it. I hate that I think it might have something to do with me.
“Find the words,” Claire warns. “This isn’t like you, and it’s not fair to him.”
“What about Anna?” Emma barks, finally standing up for herself to Claire. But I hate the cause. Fuck, I hate what happened to Anna, but will she really be a wall between us for the rest of our lives?
“Do you honestly believe Anna would want you to behave this way and use her name to do it?” Claire fights back. “Lee’s crimes were never egregious enough for this bullshit, and you know it.”
“I’m scared,” she replies, and I think now is when Claire will turn to her closest friend and offer her comfort, but she doesn’t. Her reply is just as harsh as before.
“You should be, because when Lee finds out—”
But I don’t let Claire finish that thought. It’s time to put a stop to this, so I push the door open so Wes and I can walk in.
“When Lee finds out what?” I ask. The room feels wired. The tension coming off everyone is enough to light the room. Even Wes seems off put.
“Nothing,” Emma rushes in to say, and I know it’s a lie. They weren’t arguing about nothing, but I choose to let it go for now.
“Sure,” I say with an easy smile. “What do you have for me on the autopsy?”
Emma visibly relaxes. She closes her eyes for a second and takes a deep breath. Claire looks pissed—granted, that’s one of my sister’s main emotions, so I don’t put too much stock in it. I’m sure whatever it is they were fighting about is bad, but I’m not going to force the issue with Emma. We promised to be honest with each other as we move forward with our relationship. I have to walk a fine line and unite the family I was born to with the family I’m building with Emma, because I hope with everything I’ve got that we can just be one family at the end of the day.
Emma picks up a file off her desk and flips through it quickly before handing it off to me. I open it up so I can follow along as she explains her findings to me.
“Beth Anderson, thirty years old, was found in her home,” Emma begins, and it’s like she’s a completely different person. Gone is the woman who was scared and unsure, and in her place is an intelligent woman who has earned her place in her field and has the confidence to know it. I breathe a sigh of relief to see her more herself than before. “She was injected with atropine, as were the other two victims.”
“Cause of death?” Wes asks.
“Exsanguination,” Emma says bluntly. “She bled out once her baby was removed and the incision site was never closed.”
Wes’s face pales as I know mine did when I first made the connection between the victims and the women who stand in the room with us now. It’s not a fun connection to make.
“Sounds like we have a bad guy to catch,” Wes says quietly.
“Absolutely.”
“And the babies?” he asks.
I answer with the only word I can. “Gone.”
“No trace?” he asks.
“Not a one,” I reply. “We cannot find any link. Each victim was essentially abandoned by their families, so no one is looking other than us. The babies are gone.”
“Fuck,” he bites out.
“Yeah.”
“Maybe we should take this to your office,” Claire suggests after a moment, and I can’t help but wonder why we need to go to my office. She leans in and whispers to Emma, “He should be in his territory.”
What the fuck is going on here?
“Is that what you want?” I ask Emma.
“Yeah,” she says sadly, not looking at me, and I hate it.
“Then let’s go,” I tell her gently.
Instead of taking the stairs, we ride the elevator up to the bullpen and walk through the room. It almost feels like a death march. Even Wes knows something terrible is coming, and I am the only one who doesn’t. I open the door, and everyone walks into my office. I close the door behind us and stride around to my chair, needing to put some distance between me and my family.
I sit down and take a deep breath before saying, “The truth. Now. What’s going on?”
“Now, before things get crazy,” Claire says, holding up her hands in front of her, “just know that pregnancy hormones make you do really stupid shit.”
“What did you do?” I ask quietly.
“Well…” she hedges.
“It’s not her. It’s me,” Emma admits, her blue eyes pleading for me to understand, but what, I don’t know. “I was afraid to tell you about the baby.”
“It’s not like I didn’t know. I can see you’re pregnant with my own eyes,” I explain, hoping she will put me out of my misery and tell me what’s going on here.
“I know,” she says softly. “You know what you wanted to talk about this morning? In the shower?”
I look to Wes and then Claire before responding. “Do you want to talk about this now?”
“Yes, Lee,” she says. “You’re safe, because there hasn’t been anyone else.”
“I know not now, but before.” I look at her. I don’t understand.
“No, Lee,” she murmurs. “Not ever. There was no one after you, and no one before you.”
“I don’t understand.”
“The baby is yours,” she says softly.
“We talked about this.” I smile. “I already told you that I’d raise the baby as mine. She’s mine with or without my blood.”
“I know. But it doesn’t matter.”
“So she’s mine,” I say. Not a question but a statement. One that is starting to become clearer, and I’m not liking what I’m hearing.
“Yes, but it also already was, because I haven’t slept with anyone but you,” Emma states clearly for everyone in the room to hear.
I lean forward and brace my hands on my desk for support.
“What about that guy?” I ask. I s
aw them together, both here in the station and in restaurants. I felt like I saw them together everywhere, and it was driving me fucking insane. I was so jealous, so devastated that she would choose that guy over me. Not that I think I’m the be all, end all, but I love her. I fucking love her, and she lied to me. The thought hangs heavy between us.
“He wanted there to be something between us,” she says, looking me in the eyes so I can see the truth of her words, even though it feels too little too late. “But I couldn’t. He wanted me to give up the baby so we could be together, but I didn’t want that. You know, because you saw him here, giving me a hard time about it. He wanted it, he wanted me… but I also couldn’t go there, because he wasn’t you.”
“So you were just going to keep my daughter from me?” I ask quietly, too quietly, and Wes knows exactly what that means, as his frame stiffens and he goes on alert. No one says a goddamn word. “Answer me!”
“Yes,” she whispers. “I was going to keep her from you.”
“Why?”
“It doesn’t matter why,” she cries. “I was wrong. I know that now.”
“It does matter!” I shout. “Why did you hate me so much that you would keep my only child from me?”
And she whispers the one word I should have known would be the truth behind all this mess. The one name I knew would keep coming up between us time and time again, and I just didn’t want to admit it.
“Anna.”
“You were never going to give me a chance, were you?” I ask. “You were never going to give us a chance?”
“I was wrong,” she says.
“Oh, I know you were wrong,” I say cruelly, wanting to inflict as much damage as she has done to me, whether it’s right or it’s wrong. Right now, I’m laid bare and bleeding all over my desk for everyone to see. I don’t care who hurts right now, because I’m hurting, and I don’t think it will ever stop. “But that’s not what I asked you. I asked if you were ever going to give me a chance.”
“No.”
Before the word is ever out of her mouth, my coffee mug, half filled with liquid that’s long since gone cold, is in my hand and then hurtling across the room, where it smashes against the side wall. Emma flinches but stands there, waiting for me to inflict more damage.
“I was wrong, Lee,” Emma pleads. “I’m so sorry. You have to believe me. I’m so sorry.”
“I don’t know what to believe,” I respond. It’s not the right thing to say, and we both know it, but she’s kept me from everything. From every doctor’s appointment and every ultrasound. I was a silent observer for months while she lived her lie.
“Please.” Tears flow unchecked down her face as she begs me to understand, but I just don’t know what to do. I feel cold; I feel numb. I wonder where we go from here and if I can ever trust her again.
And then my world stops on a goddamn dime.
Emma gasps and clutches her belly before dropping to her knees. I stand up, sending my chair hurtling back into the wall behind it, and I’m leaping over my desk as Wes and Claire rush to her, but we’re all not close enough. In her panic, Emma moved into the room between them and me, so we all watch in horror, me with a front row seat, as her beautiful blue eyes, ones I thought I would get to look into every day for the rest of my life, roll up into the back of her head and she drops unconscious to the ground.
Wes pulls his phone out of his pocket and dials, but I’m not paying attention. I scoop her up in my arms and think that maybe she’s right after all; maybe I do deserve to be punished, because every woman who’s ever loved me dies, and it looks like Emma is next on the list.
“I need a bus to Precinct 528!” he shouts. “We have an unconscious pregnant woman, age thirty. She showed signs of distress before collapse.”
“I’m so sorry,” I whisper as I hold the only woman I’ve ever loved in my arms. “This is all my fault. I’m so fucking sorry.”
“The ambulance is on its way,” Wes says, but I know it’s too late. Emma does not regain consciousness the entire time we wait.
It’s too fucking late.
And it’s all my fault.
FIFTEEN
* * *
LIFELESS
“Sir, you need to step back.”
Wes grabs me and hauls me back. I don’t know how I move, how my body functions; I just go where he leads me. But the entire time, my eyes stay glued to Emma’s limp body.
She’s not dead.
Those words Wes spoke just before he took her from my arms rattle around in my brain, echoing over and over again. But she still isn’t here either.
I don’t even know what happened. One minute, I was yelling, trying to come to grips with my life and how the one person I love above all else could hate me so much that she would make moves to keep my child from me. Even knowing I missed out on having my big sister in my life before she was murdered, because her mother had done the exact same fucking thing to my dad. But then the next minute, she was on the floor.
She looks so still, so lifeless.
She’s not dead.
I held her in my arms until Wes shouted, “Back here!” when the paramedics came in and took her from me.
Wes and I watch as they load her onto a gurney and run her through the station, where every officer in the department stands silently watching, to the waiting ambulance. It’s a hero walk if ever there was one.
I climb into the ambulance behind her. It’s like I have no control of my body. I have to be with her.
“I’ll meet you at the hospital,” Wes says just before they slam the ambulance doors behind us.
I sit with my head hanging and tears streaming down my face, holding her hand. The ride is silent. I don’t speak. I’m not sure I can, even if I tried, and Emma never wakes.
The paramedics talk quietly back and forth, and their radios squawk from time to time, but I don’t listen. I can’t listen. In my head, I’m screaming, and that drowns out all the noise.
The emergency room staff is waiting for us at the ambulance bay. I jump off quickly when the door opens and get out of the way as they unload her gurney.
“What do we have?” a doctor asks.
“Female, age thirty, pregnant,” the paramedic rattles off, and I want to shout that her name is Emma Parker, she’s a fucking brilliant medical examiner, that baby is mine, and I’m hopelessly in love with her. Please save them both. But I don’t. I stay quiet, gritting my teeth. “Showed signs of distress before she collapsed at work.”
“And you are?” she asks me. I have to clear my throat before I answer.
“Captain Liam Goodnite,” I inform them. “I’m her partner.”
“I wasn’t aware the patient is a police officer.”
“She’s not,” I answer. “She’s our medical examiner. What I meant was she’s mine.”
“Oh. Right this way,” a nurse says, taking my arm.
“No,” I say, digging in my heels to stop as I watch them wheel her down the hallway. “I want to go with her.”
“I know,” the nurse says gently. “But you can’t go with her now. Someone will come get you when we know more.”
And then she shoves me in a small waiting room of crying people, and I lose all hope. How could everything have gone to shit so fast?
For the first fifteen minutes, I pace. It’s like my feet can’t be still. I can’t make them be still. There’s an endless amount of energy pooling in my body. It’s dark and ugly, and there’s no other way to get it out of my body than to move. It’s like with a snakebite; you have to suck out the poison. Only this poison is endless in its supply as it slowly withers something vital inside me until it curls up and dies.
I stop in front of a window; it looks out over the parking lot, but I don’t see the cars or the asphalt. I don’t see any of that. What I do see is the way her blue eyes sparkle when she smiles at me. I see her blonde-and-pink hair spilled over my pillow the very first night I had her and knew then that I never wanted anyone else. I see the way
she threw her head back as she came for me under the dock on the beach. I see her joy over that damn nursing chair in a room just for our child, in a house that was mine but is now ours. And I see the pain etched across her beautiful face as she begged me to forgive her just before she crumpled to the ground.
And there was nothing to forgive. I was angry and hurt that she would keep something that big from me, but in the end, she’s only human, I’m only human. But I could still see with my own two eyes that she was fragile, that she was breaking apart, and I pushed her anyway. And then she broke for good.
“Are you all right?” I ask Emma as I jog the last few steps to catch up with her as she’s making her way across the parking lot of the California Diner. We’re here to meet Claire and Wes, who swear they have some big news to share.
“Yeah,” she says, looking a little sad. “Why wouldn’t I be?”
“I don’t know, honey. You tell me.”
“There’s nothing to tell, Lee,” she murmurs, and the way she says it has me thinking there is really a lot to tell. But I’ll let her have this play. She’ll tell me when she’s ready, and I’ll be here waiting for her. I’m not going anywhere.
I hold her hand in mine as we make our way to the big-glass front door of the diner that has looked like a giant silver twinkie for as long as I can remember. She pulls her hand from mine just before I reach for the door, and I barely hold in a frustrated sigh. Since the night I made her mine under the dock after my sister’s wedding, we have been together. Only, she doesn’t want anyone to know. At first, she said we just needed to give it some time, but now I’m afraid she’s never going to be ready, and I’m not feeling all that fucking great about being someone’s dirty little secret.
“Your party is right this way,” the hostess says before leading us to a table where Claire and Wes are already seated. I chuckle when I get a good look at my sister, who has had questionable taste in food since she was a kid and spent the last thirty years building her love affair with junk food. Now, she looks like she’s just been rescued from a deserted island and will eat the fucking menu if she doesn’t get food soon.
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