CHRISTMAS FOR THE DEPUTY

by Helm, Nicole

  “Right, well. I feel…sore. Heart sore. But I can’t…” She sucked in a breath and the one she let out was shaky. It wasn’t easy to admit, but she was getting there. “I can’t make him deal with things he doesn’t want to deal with. I can’t make him admit to feelings he doesn’t want to feel.”

  “It never occurred to me. That he might be so torn up.”

  “Don’t feel guilty, Dad. It never occurred to me either. Not until this past month and dealing with my issues about Mom. It only made sense in my own context. He’s very good at acting, at pretending.”

  “Apparently. He’s too smart to not see it for truth. Stubborn enough it might take some time, but you’ll get through to him.”

  Pen wished she could believe that as wholeheartedly as Dad seemed to. She knew it was possible, but part of her wondered if she had what it took. “Thanks. I just want to try and enjoy Christmas.” She rubbed at her chest. Her heart really did hurt, but she was accustomed to good and hurt existing in the same day. The same second. She’d deal and handle both.

  “For what it’s worth, I…” He cleared his throat again, clearly dealing with a bigger emotion than he was letting on. “You sounded like her. The way she would have fought. The way she fought for me a time or two. She would have been very proud of a great many things you’ve done and survived in your life, Pen, but she would have been especially proud of that.”

  Pen stood, doing her best to blink back tears since she knew how uncomfortable they made her father. Still, she wrapped him in a tight hug. “Thank you, Daddy.”

  Dad grunted and awkwardly patted her back, which made her smile. She pulled away on a deep breath.

  “I need to go help Sadie with dinner. Get the girls to wash up.”

  “Mack and Colt were helping. Brack was rounding up the girls. All we need is you.”

  Pen smiled. “Me, you’ve got.” She reached for the door, but it was opening before she managed to get there.

  Sadie poked in looking oddly frazzled.

  “Pen. We…we can’t find Addie.”

  There was a moment where those words together didn’t make any sense. She could only stare at Sadie and feel utterly and wholly dumb. “What do you mean?”

  “We’ve looked everywhere. The girls haven’t seen her since this morning.” Sadie wrung her hands together. “I checked on her at lunch but her door was locked and she told me to go away.”

  “Me too.”

  “Her door isn’t locked anymore. She’s not in her room, and we’ve started looking all over, but there’s no sign of her.”

  Pen swallowed at the swift kick of panic. “She was angry. She’s hiding. Trying to scare us. That’s all.”

  Sadie nodded, but she noted her sister didn’t look any more convinced than Pen herself felt. Addie had tried to hitch a ride home from the parade. Pen had been so wrapped up in her own stuff, so sure Addie would grow out of these moods and random bouts of saying she hated it here.

  “Why don’t you come check her room with me?” Sadie said, taking Pen’s arm. “Dad, you know the land better. Take the Gator out.”

  Dad was moving out the door before Sadie finished the sentence. Sadie pulled Pen into the hallway.

  “You can’t start blaming yourself before we even know what’s going on,” Sadie said brusquely. But Pen knew her sister well enough to know that brusque was trying to hide panic and fear.

  “I haven’t been listening to her.”

  “She’s twelve. Which isn’t to say you shouldn’t listen to her, but you can’t take every snotty comment to heart. Especially not when you’re dealing with your own stuff. Addie gets mad and she acts out, but most days she’s happy. Here and with us. You know that.”

  Pen wanted to know that, but she wasn’t so certain she did. She stepped into Addie and Brynn’s room. It was its usual mess—a mishmash of the opposite interests her girls had. But the first thing Pen noticed was that Henry’s picture was missing.

  “She ran away. Really ran away.” Pen started pawing through her messy, unmade bed. The bear with a police uniform and Henry’s name stitched on it that each of the girls had gotten was gone too. “She’s taken all Henry’s stuff. She seriously ran away.” Pen stood for a brief second completely frozen by panic. “She ran away.”

  “Call Ethan. On the crazy off chance she got off the property, he’ll know what to do.”

  Pen shook her head, her hands shaking as she dug her phone out of her pocket. “He won’t answer a call from me.”

  “Fine.” Sadie pulled out her own phone and held it to her ear. Presumably Ethan answered, but Sadie didn’t even pause for a hello.

  “Addie ran away.” After a moment, Sadie held out the phone to her. “He said he needs to talk to you.”

  With nerveless fingers, Pen took the phone. “Ethan?”

  “Call dispatch with a description and answer all their questions. Make sure you tell them you’re her mother. They’ll put out the official alert. Keep looking on the property. There’s a lot of places to hide, and almost always in missing kids’ cases they’re just in the house. It’d be awfully hard for her to get all the way out here, but we’ll make sure. You go on and call dispatch. I’ll text you the number, okay?”

  “Ethan…”

  “Then call all of her friends and ask them if they know anything. Relay any information to me or dispatch. We’ll find her, Pen. I promise.”

  Ethan might pretend, he might be mad at her or whatever, but Pen had to believe that promise.

  *

  Every second that ticked by without word on Addie made the thing that had been wrapped around Ethan’s lungs all day tighter. Deadlier.

  He didn’t know how she would have gotten off the property. She had to be on the farm. But they hadn’t found her yet.

  Where would a twelve-year-old go?

  When he’d wanted to escape his home, he’d tried getting in trouble. But that was because he hadn’t been loved. He wasn’t running from…whatever Addie was running from. The argument with Brynn. What he’d said to her about doing it out of meanness. Something bigger. Something smaller. She was running from an event.

  He’d been running from a prison sentence.

  Hadn’t Mack run away once when she’d been really little? When Fritz had still been struggling with Susannah’s death. They’d found her in town somewhere…at the bus station?

  Ethan did an illegal U-turn and headed for the bus station. The buses didn’t run this late on Christmas Eve, and the outside depot was mostly open. It was dark except for the security lights, and under those lights was a small lump on a bench outside the depot.

  He nearly fell to his knees in thanks, but worry and some shade of horror had him parking and jumping out of his cruiser. He texted Pen quickly as he strode toward Addie.

  When Addie heard him coming, she scowled. “Go away.”

  “Addie. You’ve got everyone frantically searching for you. I’m not going away. I’ve already told your mom I found you.”

  “I want to go home.”

  “I’ll take you home.”

  “No. Not that stupid place. San Antonio. My old house. I want to go home and see my dad and have everything go back to the way it was and I don’t want to ever see you again.”

  “Me?”

  “I hate you! I hate you the most. I hate…” She had big tears rolling down her cheeks and she just broke down into sobs. “Why don’t you want us?”

  Ethan could only stare. “Addie, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  Her head whipped up, desolation turning to fury in five seconds flat. “You said if Mom didn’t have us, you would be with her, but you couldn’t handle her three kids.”

  “That isn’t what…” Christ. Had he said that? It wasn’t what he’d meant, but if she’d been eavesdropping she could have misconstrued. “Addie, that’s all out of context. I didn’t say it like that. I don’t mean it like that.”

  “I don’t care. Context is stupid. You’re stupid. Every
thing is stupid and I want my old life back.”

  “I know you do. But it’s gone.”

  Which he only realized was the worst possible thing to say when she started sobbing in earnest. He picked her up and sat on the bench, pulling her into his lap. He held her while she cried and wondered how any mother could do this.

  Have your heart ripped to shreds because there was nothing you could do to take that pain away for a child. He just had to hold her while she felt it.

  He sucked in a sharp breath. Because here he was, heart ripped to shreds and holding her while she cried and…simply surviving. Because it was the only choice. Because it was about helping her, not the pain it caused him.

  She sniffled and wiped her cheeks, slowly getting a hold of herself. But she stayed on his lap, curled against him.

  “How did you get out here?”

  “Cathy’s brother drove us over to the bakery.” She sniffled, her head snuggled into his shoulder. “Then Cathy told him my mom picked me up while he was gone.”

  “Do you have any idea of how dangerous that was? To be here alone? No phone. No money.”

  Her head popped up. “I have money! But all the buses were gone by the time I got here.”

  “Would you have really done that?”

  “I have friends in San Antonio. I could have stayed with one of them. I made a plan. Ever since we moved here.”

  “Addie. I… Do you know how badly this is going to hurt your mother?”

  Her chin wobbled but she didn’t start crying again. “Maybe she would have been better off. Maybe two girls wouldn’t be so hard for you.” She said it snottily, but it shook him how much of this was about him. About what he’d said to Pen that he’d never meant Addie to overhear.

  “You misunderstood me, Addie. Completely.” He didn’t want to tell her about his father. It was too complicated and the last thing he wanted to do was scare her. “I was just trying to protect you from some…hard things. I was telling your mom I didn’t want to drag you four into it. I didn’t want to hurt you. So, I was going to stay away from… I just thought it would be better to be alone.”

  Telling it to a twelve-year-old, hearing it echo there between him, something inside of him shifted. With Addie on his lap he finally realized…

  He wouldn’t let his father touch her. Not her or Brynn or Daisy. Not Fritz. Not Pen or Mack or Sadie. And Colt and Bracken would stand right beside him to make sure that didn’t happen.

  He’d do whatever it took, just like Susannah had for him once upon a time. He knew that in his soul.

  Which made everything Pen had said to him this morning feel…all that more convicting.

  “If it’s a hard thing, a scary thing, you’re not supposed to run away from it. You’re supposed to ask for help.”

  Ethan was rendered frozen and mute. How many times had Susannah said that to him in their short time together? “Who told you that?” he choked out.

  She shrugged. “No one exactly. Daddy used to say he was a helper, so there was never any shame asking for help. And Mom would tell him she wasn’t ashamed, she just didn’t want to. But he was right.”

  It almost made Ethan smile since it was such a patently Pen thing to say. But he looked at the girl in his lap, a girl he’d die for without question. He would do that, but he wouldn’t give himself over fully to that feeling? He’d act, but he wouldn’t give?

  “I guess I need help then.” From a twelve-year-old? What was wrong with him?

  “With what?”

  “I’m afraid.” He wasn’t sure he’d ever admitted that to anyone, but Addie looked up at him with new consideration in her eyes.

  “Of what?”

  “That your mom was right. That all the reasons I had for turning away from my heart were because I was afraid of what I was feeling. Not because of all the reasons I made up in my head.”

  “I hate when she’s right.”

  “Yeah. She is more often than not.”

  “I guess,” Addie grumbled.

  “You didn’t ask her for help,” Ethan pointed out. “You’ve been planning to run away, but you haven’t told her. You haven’t asked her to help you get through your feelings. You had to know this would hurt her.”

  “Sometimes it hurts so much inside me I just want to make it hurt for everyone else. I’m supposed to write in my journal.” She rolled her eyes.

  Ethan nodded. Even though he hadn’t felt that way, that had been Bracken before Susannah had died.

  But Susannah had saved them, changed them in life and then in death.

  He didn’t need to save or change Addie, but maybe he could still help. By doing something he’d never done with anyone, not even the people he loved. Actually…talk. About feelings. “You know, I don’t think I ever really dealt with your grandma dying. I know you didn’t know her, but she was a mother to me. She meant a lot to me. And a lot like your dad, she died kind of suddenly when it felt like we really needed her.”

  “We did need him,” Addie whispered.

  “But see, you lost him. I know that’s hard. I’ve lost Susannah and I lost my sister. I thought there was something I could have done to change it, but there’s not really. Life can be a little mean.” He thought of what Pen had said about life hurting, which is why you had to let the love in. “But if you’re lucky, you have a really great family who loves you. And when you lose someone, you all work together to help each other. Love each other. You have that family, Addie. I know you know that.”

  “I didn’t mean to hurt Brynn’s feelings this morning,” she whispered. “I just didn’t want to see her disappointed.”

  “See? You were trying to protect her, just like parents try to protect their kids. But it’s hard sometimes to know how to do it, and people don’t always appreciate it. And sometimes…” Ethan took a deep breath to try to ease the tightening in his throat. “Sometimes we tell ourselves we’re protecting someone we love, but what we’re really doing is protecting ourselves.”

  “Maybe. I don’t like… I don’t want to hope for good things, but I hoped for you. And then…you said…”

  He closed his eyes, amazed the waves of pain could keep coming and he could get through them. Talk through them. But he had to. For Addie.

  “I love you, Addie. No choice I ever make would change that. Nothing I ever say should make you think otherwise. And I’ll work very hard to make sure I don’t.”

  She nodded solemnly.

  “I need a promise from you now.”

  “No more running away,” she grumbled. She let out a gusty sigh. “I just… Everything hurt. I didn’t want to feel that way. I wanted to get away from it.”

  How well he understood that. But he’d never run away from the Martins. No, that was too big a sacrifice. So he’d held himself back and separate. Because he didn’t want to feel that way—whatever way it was.

  “You know, a long time ago your grandma told me I should ask for help. I didn’t listen, but I’m going to try to listen to you, okay? And I want you to know, you can always ask me for help. Always.”

  She watched him very seriously. “Are you in love with my mom?”

  He could have given her a lot of answers, but with all this pain inside of him, he only had the truth. “Yes.”

  “Are you going to be with her? Like…Cathy’s mom has a boyfriend. But they’re getting married.”

  Ethan rubbed a hand over his face. “I don’t… I don’t know.”

  “You should. You make her happy. She should be happy.” She seemed to think it over for a minute. “And you should be happy. If you love her, you’re supposed to be together.”

  “Even if it means you have to stay at the farm and not move back to San Antonio?”

  Addie shrugged. “I guess.”

  “I don’t know what’s going to happen between me and your mom, Addie, but whatever it is, I promise—I’m part of your life, part of your family. So, no more eavesdropping. No more thinking the worst of what you hear without talking it
out, deal?”

  She nodded reluctantly.

  He stood, gently placing her on her feet. “All right. Now, I’ve got to get you home.”

  “Mom’s going to be mad,” Addie replied, looking at his cruiser dubiously.

  “Very,” he agreed. “But you’re going to ask for help. And you’re going to tell her how you feel. Your mom loves you no matter what.”

  “I know.” Addie slid her hand in his. “I love you, Ethan.”

  If that wasn’t the final nail in his coffin, he didn’t know what would be.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Pen nearly leapt out the door when she heard the engine. She knew better than to believe anyone was actually asleep, but everyone had left her to deal with Addie one on one once they’d heard she was safe.

  Luckily Daisy and Brynn were easily distracted by Christmas cookies and tales of Santa, so while they might have had some idea of what was going on, they hadn’t been overly interested. They’d fallen asleep after sugar crashes, ready to wake up to Christmas morning.

  Pen stepped out into Christmas Eve night and tried to remind herself it was a season to be forgiving.

  Ethan stepped out of his cruiser, his uniform looking so menacing as he helped her firstborn out of the car. The lights didn’t make it look festive or sweet. It looked like doom.

  But that was an overreaction. Addie was safe. The end.

  Addie trudged toward the porch, Ethan following at a distance.

  “Adelaide Susannah Wakefield. I don’t even know how to describe how much trouble you’re in,” Pen managed, though her voice wavered and the second Addie was close enough Pen grabbed her and held on. “Baby. You scared me to death.”

  Addie didn’t say anything, but she made the choking sound she always did when she was trying not to cry.

  Pen finally managed to release her. “You go on up to my room. I’ll be up in a second to have a talk with you.”

  Addie didn’t argue, and she didn’t stomp off but moved away quietly. She’d clearly been crying either with Ethan or before he’d found her. Pen closed her eyes for a minute, prayed to find the right way to handle all this.

  “She was at the bus station?” she managed to ask Ethan.