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“Avery, honey. Stop,” I ordered, wrapping my arms around her tight. “Avery, what’s wrong?”
She froze, her eyes opening wide, and stared into my eyes as if she was just now realizing whose arms she was in.
“What’s wrong?” I asked again now that I had her attention.
She swallowed hard.
“That day,” she said. “I’d fallen at school. Fucking Rachel, the girl who doesn’t have a nice bone in her body, had tripped me. I’d fallen and hit my head on the bleachers on the way out of the pep rally. It’d started bleeding, and I threw up my lunch all over Rachel’s shoes as she feigned sorrow for ‘accidentally tripping me.’”
I didn’t know where she was going with this, but now that she was talking, I wasn’t going to interrupt her or urge her to talk faster.
“It was Monday. August sixth. Three years ago.” She looked lost. “The school called my dad and my mom, but neither one of them answered. Neither one of them answered for a whole two hours. I wasn’t sure what was going on since they were both off that day, but I ended up driving myself to the hospital to get stitches. It wasn’t until an hour later when they were finishing up my forehead that my mom finally came in looking frazzled. My dad didn’t make it at all. He came in that night around eight looking happy and upbeat. Until he saw my forehead. My mother tore into him that night after I went to bed. About how ‘it was her day’ or whatever the fuck that was supposed to mean.”
She pressed her forehead against my chest.
“I found a receipt today,” she continued. “Actually, a lot of receipts. One bearing that date.”
She pulled away then, leading me back into the house.
“They all are for a place in Waco,” she continued. “They have my dad’s name on them, so I know that they’re his. Fancy restaurants. Jewelry stores. Gas station receipts that coincide with him driving down to Waco from here.”
The picture in question was of her father in all black with a girl in all white. They were pressed close, showing without words needing to be said that they obviously cared for each other.
“My parents never throw anything away,” she continued. “I have receipts from all the way back in the 1990s in their office that they shared. So I got to looking, and my mom has receipts of her own in her closet. And a picture of a man that I also saw at her funeral.”
I had a sinking feeling that I knew exactly what was about to be said here.
“You think they were cheating?” I guessed.
She sat down on her mother’s bed and looked down at her hands.
“I don’t think it’s cheating if the other spouse does it, too,” she said softly. “I think they had an open relationship.”
Now that knocked the wind right out of me.
“You don’t know that for—” She interrupted me by gesturing toward a computer.
“I already found her on Facebook,” she said softly. “I saw her at the funeral. I had to go look in the book that I kept of all the names of people that went. I typed in a hundred and ten women’s names until she came up.”
I walked up to the computer and stared at the woman and the newborn baby.
I looked at the next picture. And the next. And the next.
“Holy fuck,” I said softly.
Because the vast majority of all the photos of the baby were themed.
The thin blue line.
The death of a police officer.
The death of a child’s police officer father who died in the line of duty.
“Holy fuck,” I said again.
“I have a brother or sister, don’t I, Derek?” she questioned.
I wanted to say no.
But with all the evidence in play here…
“Did you do any more research?” I wondered.
“No,” she whispered. “That’s all that I did.”
That was really all that she needed to do.
“What are you going to do?” I asked softly.
“I don’t know,” she said again. “I think that I’m just going to leave it alone. For now. I’m going to pack this stuff up. I’m going to put it all into a box and tape it closed until such time that I can revisit this without freaking the hell out.”
I turned to look at her.
“You’re going to revisit it, though?” I asked.
She nodded once.
“I’m going to have to look into this. It’s too important,” she promised. “I have graduation coming up in a month and a half. I’ve got photoshoots galore this weekend. And I need to move. I just can’t… I can’t do it right now.”
I didn’t blame her one bit.
“Let’s pack all this shit up and put it into a box for later,” I agreed. “I’ll do in here if you want?”
She looked at all the papers sprawled across the room and nodded once.
