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“I wouldn’t necessarily say that. We’ve eliminated the known variables. Which means I can have my guy start looking into other avenues to pursue.”
“Like?”
“Given the fact that the little one was just dropped off on your doorstep, we could be looking at a charge of child endangerment for our mystery mom. It might be that she has some priors. We compare Violet’s blood to women who are in the police system, maybe we get some hits.”
The thought is tempting, but I shake my head. “No. I don’t want to lock her mother up in jail. I just wanna know why she dropped Violet here. After almost a year, why now? Maybe she needed help for a little while, or something. Maybe she’s planning on coming back.”
“You want to give her up?”
I sigh. The breeze blowing through the Dallas air is cold and unforgiving. “Do I look like Father of the Year to you, E? I have no idea what I’m doing. My daughter was sick and screaming in my arms and I didn’t have a goddamn clue how to handle it.”
“You know, you can learn how to parent. People have been doing it for, oh, I dunno… a few hundred thousand years, give or take.”
I snort. If that was true, my father could have learned to be a better parent. My mother didn’t have to learn. She just had it.
And I don’t.
“Not an option,” I say shortly. Elliot knows some of my backstory, but not all of it, if only because no one knows all of it. But even with him, that’s a can of worms I keep sealed shut.
“Have you thought about adoption then?” he suggests. “With the way things are, it might be the best idea.” He says it gently, softly, all but adding, I have your best interests at heart, Reese.
Which is why the intensity of my reaction surprises me.
“No!” I shout. Anger blazes through my veins for a reason I can’t quite comprehend. It takes me a seconds-long struggle to rein myself back in. “No, that’s not what I want.”
If Elliot is taken aback, he shows no sign of it. “Okay then. So how do you want to proceed? I can’t make the choice for you.”
He’s right; I have to settle on something. Keep Violet and just stay in limbo about her mother? Put some woman I barely remember in jail? Give her up?
No. Never give her up. Not as long as there’s still air in my lungs.
“I need some time to think about it.”
31
REESE
I pull into my garage, exhausted. That luxurious waterfall shower might not happen. Face-planting straight into my pillows sounds like a better idea.
Home is a dangerous place these days. In here, I don’t have the distraction of the ice to keep the worst of my intrusive thoughts at bay. So my mind swirls, the same dredged-up mix of bullshit that’s been tormenting me since the day my doorbell rang.
Olivia. Violet. The woman that gave up our child on my doorstep. The precarious place all this has as I try to keep a grip on myself and my team.
I don’t know why I linger in the garage. It’s dark, dank, and smells wet. That might be a problem since the only thing I keep in here are cardboard boxes full of memories that I prefer to stash out of sight.
So why do I gravitate toward them now?
I drop my bag on the ground by the door and drift over to the stacks. They’re so old that the ink on the outside has long since faded. The one on the top was never closed properly, so a kid-sized wooden hockey stick peeks out the top and the sides bulge with the contents.
I pick it up and set it on the ground. Kneeling down, I start to rummage through.
The hockey stick was the first one I ever played with. It’s not actually a proper stick; it’s a pair of fallen branches duct-taped together, one shaved into something like a stick-face with a pair of kitchen scissors. Jagged edges and splinters line the whole shaft.
I fucking loved it.
I loved that thing, playing street hockey with the other boys who didn’t have money to buy real equipment. It was an escape. Some of us used it to forget we were hungry. Others just didn’t want to be in houses that had no A/C or running water.
Me? I was running away from my father and all the bullshit that came with him.
