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She stopped and turned back to face me. The corners of her mouth curved down.
I nodded toward the front door. “I’ll walk you out.” I looked over at Hailey. “I’ll be back in a few minutes. Why don’t you get started on your homework?”
Her brows drew together. “Uhhh…because it’s summer, and I don’t have any?”
I shook my head. “Just go watch TV for a few minutes then.”
Elodie walked ahead of me to the door. Her ass swayed back and forth in a pair of tight jeans. This woman—she was Eve, and that ass was my shiny apple.
Once we got to the hall, she folded her arms across her chest and waited for me to speak.
I cleared my throat. “Hailey asked me if I could take her to visit her father in prison. I wanted to get your opinion on how I should handle that.”
The stern mask she’d been wearing for the last week and a half slipped down. “Oh. Wow. That’s a tough one.”
I nodded. “I hate the thought of bringing her to a prison, of her having to see him in that environment. But, as she’s reminded me, she’s seen her father in worse conditions. And the bottom line is, he is her father. The way he dumped her here and disappeared like he did—I have to wonder if she wants to see for herself that he’s okay.”
Elodie looked down at her feet, seemingly lost in thought. When she looked up, I realized it was the first time she’d made eye contact with me in more than a week. “I don’t think I ever told you about my father.”
When I’d interviewed her, she’d said something about a shitty childhood—it was her justification as to why she was the right person for the job. But we’d never discussed anything in detail.
“You’ve mentioned you had a difficult time growing up, like Hailey.”
She nodded and stood a little taller. “Both of my parents are alcoholics. Raging alcoholics. Or were raging alcoholics. Well, technically, I think my mother is still a raging alcoholic—I’m not sure. We aren’t that close, and I don’t really want to know. But I guess that’s irrelevant to the story. Anyway, my dad was a cop, and most of his friends were cops that drank too much, too. Birds of a feather and all.”
She shrugged. “He would think nothing of drinking all afternoon at a friend’s barbecue and then driving us home. I knew right from wrong, but I guess I also figured he was a cop—so that made it okay for him to break the law. The day before my twelfth birthday, we were on our way home from one of those summer barbecues, and my dad was swerving all over the road. He’d had way too much to drink and ended up wrapping our car around a tree. My mom suffered a broken leg and a few broken ribs. I was sitting behind her in the back seat and somehow walked away with nothing more than a few scratches and bruises. But my father didn’t have his seat belt on. He went through the windshield and was thrown over a hundred feet. He broke his neck and was instantly paralyzed.”
“Jesus. I’m sorry.”
“Thank you. He was in the hospital for a long time. They actually arrested him and arraigned him there. My mom wanted me to visit him with her, but I was too mad at what he’d done—what they’d both done. Not to mention that I was mortified at school because it was all over the news: disgraced police officer drives drunk and almost kills his family.”
“Did you visit him?”
Elodie shook her head. “Nope. I was stubborn.” She smirked. “I know you’ll have a hard time believing that.”
I smiled. “Yeah. Seems totally out of character now. Because you’re so easy going.”
“Anyway, paraplegics are at risk for a lot of health problems related to being immobile. Thrombosis is one of them. One night, he apparently had some swelling in his arm. The next morning he was dead from a blood clot.”
I closed my eyes and nodded. “And you’d not visited him in the hospital.”
“He was there for five weeks, and I never went.”
“Do you regret it?”
She nodded. “I’m not sure why, but I do. I wish I’d gone even once. Maybe it would’ve helped to have my last memory of my father be him sober and suffering the consequences of his actions. I don’t know. But I’ve always regretted it.”
“I guess I have my answer then.”
Elodie leaned forward and pushed the button to call the elevator. When it arrived, she stepped inside and looked at me sadly. The doors started to close, and I just couldn’t let her go without saying something.
I stuck my hand out and stopped them from sliding shut. “I’m sorry about the mess I made between us. I was wrong to take your underwear. And I was wrong to speak to you the way I did last week when you walked in on my date. You didn’t deserve that.”
