As Smith does as asked, I drag Alice’s weighted body to the edge of her monstrous pool. Considering the fact my hands can circle her waist, she shouldn’t feel as if she weighs a ton.
It takes all my strength to lift her onto the pool’s edge, but it has nothing on the weight that slams down on me when Lucy suddenly falls at her mother’s side a couple of seconds later.
She didn’t escape Rocco’s clutch. He freed her so he can help me fix the second injustice I made today. The first was letting Roxanne out of my sight. “Dip her head back, you need to open up her airways.”
As Lucy holds her mother’s hand, crying for her to wake up, I rip open Alice’s shirt and bra, cover her chest with my hands like I did almost nine years ago, then press down.
I do four compressions before Rocco uses her tilted chin to his advantage. He breathes into her mouth two times before raising his eyes to mine. “You were only supposed to scare her, D. You weren’t meant to kill—.”
I glare at him, cutting his scorn off halfway.
I’m riddled with guilt.
He doesn’t need to make it worse.
Even confident I have nothing to answer for, the disdain in Rocco’s eyes is too strong to discount. He’s been angry at me many times and has wanted to rip my head off even more than that, but this is the first time he’s been truly disappointed in me. “She helped them take Roxanne. She knew her pregnancy wasn’t a hoax.”
My confession sees me pumping Alice’s chest more forcefully than needed. It can’t be helped. I either take my aggression out on her chest or push her head back under the water until there’s no chance she’ll survive. This is the kinder of the two and only occurring because her daughter is kneeling across from me, ashen-faced and crying.
“She did it for…” I stop myself in just enough time. If anything Alice said was true, and I have a feeling it was, Lucy will already be traumatized. I don’t need to add more angst to the bucketloads she has to tell her future therapists.
“Again.”
Rocco barely forces half a breath into Alice’s lungs when the gurgle of a woman clawing her way back from the brink of death sees him pulling back.
While Alice coughs up the water in her lungs, the sound of sirens is heard in the distance. She lives in a rich, leafy suburb that’s so quiet, it’s easy to distinguish the difference between a paramedic’s wails and that of an unmarked police car.
“We need to go,” Rocco says, stating the obvious. He rolls Alice on her side before re-tilting her head. It’s clear from the rise and fall of her chest that she’s breathing. She just hasn’t fully come around yet—emotionally, not physically. “When she wakes up, keep her on her side, okay?” he says to Lucy. “She has lots of water in her lungs she needs to get out.”
Like the brave girl she was born to be, Lucy wipes at the tears high on her cheeks before dipping her chin at Rocco’s suggestion. She looks like she wants to gut me, but there’s nothing but admiration in her eyes as she stares at Rocco.
“Send someone to collect her grandmother. Make sure she gets here before CPS. If she spends an hour with them, Smith, we’ll have more than words.”
He doesn’t absorb my threat. He gets straight to work on locating Lucy’s only surviving relative before updating us on how close the sirens we hear wailing in the distance are. “It’s a single unit, but he isn’t on payroll.”
That means it can only be one man. Detective Ryan Carter.
While snagging a towel from a rack on my right to cushion Alice’s head, I say, “Log a disturbance one block back. Ensure it mentions the words ‘shots fired’ and ‘officer down.’”
Ryan can’t help but be a hero. He was born to be one. Me, on the other hand, no matter what happens today, my credits won’t ever include a synonym of the word. Every story needs a villain. It’s just never anticipated for him to also be the leading man.
As Smith mimics the panicked voice of an officer in the middle of a furious gun battle, I shift my eyes to Lucy. It’s stupid of me to do. All I can see in her big blue eyes is Fien in a couple of years. It has me convinced the carnage will never end. Whether right now or twenty years in the future, I will forever fight to keep my daughter safe. I just want the privilege of showing her how I’d go to the end of the world for her.
I also want to do the same for Roxanne. She put her life on the line for my daughter, and now she and our unborn child are at risk. I won’t see her go through what Audrey did. I don’t care what it takes, I will stop it before it has the chance to transpire. I’ll keep her safe as I failed to do my wife. Then maybe, just maybe, the guilt I’ve felt the past two years will finally slacken enough I can secure an entire breath.
“I’m sorry, Luce,” I whisper in a low, dull tone, the angst eating me alive too strong to discount.
My apology is barely audible, but the weight it lifts from my chest is phenomenal. It makes my steps to my car quick and buoyant like Lucy will forgive me as quickly as I’m hoping Alice will.
My lengthy strides freeze mid-pump when the faint voice of Lucy trickles into my ears not even a few seconds later. She called my name, undeserving salutation and all. It has me spinning to face her even faster than she dashes across the pavers lining the poolside to gather up her iPad she was mesmerized by when I arrived.
For the way her chubby cheeks bounce when she stops to stand in front of me, her words shouldn’t be anywhere near as mature as they are. “Daddy always said it’s too late to say you’re sorry once you’ve done bad, but Mommy and I don’t agree.” Her lips quiver as she confesses, “She hasn’t stopped crying all morning. She said it was because she was excited to see me after my sleepover. I didn’t believe her. Look, she was even crying when she read me a bedtime story.”
She twists her iPad around to show me a screenshot dated a little after eight last night. It doesn’t just show Alice’s tear-stained face as she endeavors to put on a brave front for her daughter, it features Lucy’s screen as well. Since she is holding her device far away from her face, several identifiable markers are seen behind her.
As it dawns on me what she’s showing me, Lucy pushes her iPad into my hand, smiles in a way that reveals I’m still in her shit book, then she skips back to her mother’s side.
I stare at her in awe for the next several minutes, stunned as fuck. If I hadn’t spared her mother’s life, I guarantee she wouldn’t have shared this information with me. She’s only doing it because she knows how this industry works. If she scratches my back, hers will never be itchy. She’s a mastermind in the making, and she’s only eight.
