“You listen here?—”
“Elliot, please,” Frankie cried, pulling me back to my seat as I rose to my feet, towering over the infuriating woman. I fell back down into the chair, my body coiled tight like it would snap at any moment. “My children were nowhere near that situation, Ma’am. I would never do something like that around them. And I wasn’t in the wide open, I was in a personal vehicle.”
“No, they weren’t around that night, Ms. Blake.” The woman stood up, gathering her paperwork, “Because once again, someone else was taking care of them for you while you frolicked around doing whatever you damn well please.” She walked away from the table. “We’ll be in touch. In the meantime, no contact with the minors involved.”
Without another word, she left the room, leaving a shattered and broken Frankie in her wake.
The truck rideto Lucy Blake’s home, in the middle of the night, was a quiet kind of hell.
Frankie sat curled against the passenger door, her forehead pressed to the cold glass, papers clutched tight in her lap. Shewouldn’t let go of that damn envelope holding all the cruel and untrue things they claimed against her.
She had no tears left to cry, no words left to say, she was simply silent. And the silence was so thick it pressed in on my chest, making it hard to breathe.
We should be going home, to the cabin, to Travis and the kids, but the agents refused to budge on their order for no interaction, and Frankie was being forced to stay at Lucy’s for the time being.
I just prayed it wouldn’t be for long, because a part of her was dying inside with each minute separated from her children.
I wanted to fill the silence, promising her it would be okay, that we’d fight it, and that the department created to protect children wouldn’t succeed in destroying a happy home based on lies fed to them by a monster. But every word felt like a lie when she looked so broken.
So instead, I reached across the seat and wrapped my hand around hers. She didn’t move, didn’t squeeze it back, but she didn’t pull away either.
I held on anyway.
By the time we pulled into her mom’s driveway, it felt like years had passed since I had left the house that morning for work.
How had I lived three lifetimes in a single day?
The porch light outside Lucy’s small cape glowed warm, but everything inside of me was ice as Frankie silently slid from the truck without making any eye contact with me.
Lucy was waiting in the doorway, wrapped up tight in an oversized sweater, her face pale and crumpled. She didn’t ask questions as we walked into her home, she just pulled Frankie into her arms the second she crossed the threshold.
“My baby,” She whispered, rocking her grown daughter like she was a little girl all over again. “My sweet baby girl.”
Frankie clung to her for a second before she slipped free, her voice hollow and thin. “I can’t. I can’t be soft right now. Please, just let me go.”
With dead eyes, she turned to me, like the fight had already been drained from her soul. “Eli,” She whispered, swallowing down as emotions tried to make her crumble, “Take care of them. Please, just—tell them I love them and that I’m sorry.” She broke, shoulders crumbling under it all as she sobbed, “Tell them how sorry I am.”
The bottom dropped out of my world as I took a step toward her, “Frankie, no?—”
But she backed away, moving down the hall and disappearing into the dark of her childhood bedroom, the door clicking shut behind her with finality.
I stood frozen in the entryway, Lucy’s hand clutching mine, her eyes wet and pleading. “Don’t let her give up, Eli,” She begged, “He can’t win. She won’t survive it.”
All I could do was nod, heart splitting wide open because I knew her words were the truth. Frankie wouldn’t be able to exist on this earth if she was kept from her kids, they were her world. “Don’t let her out of your sight,” I murmured, taking a deep breath and forcing my shoulders to stand firm and strong. “We have to be sturdy when she can’t be, but we have to keep her safe.”
Her mom nodded, knowing how fragile our black cat was at that very moment, and squeezed my hand. “Go home to Trav, I’ve got our girl.”
I backed out of her home, back out into the icy cold night even though I wanted to push my way into Frankie’s space, and hold her tight while she fell apart so all the broken pieces of her soul would have a safe place to be stored until she was ready to let me put them all back together again, but I couldn’t.
Not at the moment.
Instead, I pulled out of her driveway and headed toward home.
I couldn’t help Frankie right now, but I could help the kids to feel as little of a ripple as possible while we all lived in limbo.
With my very last dying breath, I’d take care of those damn kids like they were my own, because at this point, they were.
They were ours.
