“Ma’am, are these your children?”
“They are. I mean, some of them are.”
“Where are the parents who are supposed to be supervising these kids?” he asked.
Kiersten and Rosamund stepped forward.
“Officer, this is clearly some kind of a mix-up—” Rosamund began.
“Please, ma’am.” The officer raised his hand. “If you could just remain quiet while we try to determine what happened here.”
“It’s obvious what happened here,” Trey said, coming forward to stand beside his father. “These moms are day drinkingagain, leaving their kids completely unsupervised. They do it all the time.”
Piper’s nostrils flared. “That’s a lie and you know it.”
Kiersten’s mouth dropped open. “We were atyour house,” she protested. “At a party hosted byyour wife.”
“These kids are never in school,” Chip said, throwing his hands up in apparent frustration. “They roam the cul-de-sac day and night like a band of hoodlums, terrorizing their neighbors, leaving weird things on people’s doorsteps. Breaking into people’s homes. They noticed our building site is unattended today, so they came in with their spray paint and vandalized the place.”
“But you invited us to come over.” Matthew lifted his chin, eyes blazing with indignation. “Youtold usto meet you here.”
Trey narrowed his eyes. “You’re a cool liar for someone so young.”
The officer glanced over at Trey and Chip. “I think you two can head home now. We’ll follow up with you later.”
“This is our property, officer,” Chip protested. “And we will not leave our property while these kids—”
“I understand that, sir,” the officer said, patient but with an authoritative edge to his voice. “But I need to ask these kids some questions, and your presence isn’t helpful right now. We’ll handle things from here. And we’ll be in touch shortly.”
Chip turned on his heel with a derisive snort, muttering something about his tax dollars at work. Trey scowled at the officer, then followed his father out of the house.
Matthew turned to his mother when they left, a panicked expression on his young face. “Mom, we’re telling the truth. We didn’t vandalize anything. It was like this when we got here.”
Kiersten looked into his eyes and saw the truth. Her kids would never do something like this. And suddenly she knew the phraseher kidsincluded Rosamund’s and Piper’s girls too. They wereallher kids.
She pulled him into a hug. “I know that, honey. Everything’s gonna be fine.” Then to her mortification, shehiccupped.
The officer looked over at Kiersten. “Ma’am, have you been drinking?”
“Drinking? I ... well, yes, actually, but I’ve only had a couple ...”
The officers exchanged a glance. “Maybe we need to get social services involved here,” one muttered to the other.
Kiersten twisted the skin on her upper arm. A nightmare. This had to be a nightmare, and if she just pinched herself hard enough, she’d wake up.
Pain prickled her flesh, yet everything remained the same.
She already had a black mark next to her name after the incident on the Turnpike.
What if they took her kids away?
Her knees went weak, and she gripped a sawhorse for balance, trapped in the worst kind of nightmare.
The kind you have when you’re wide awake.
She’d tried to give her children what she had growing up. A childhood filled with love and freedom, with enough space to read and explore, to become bored, to tinker and experiment, to learn independence by roaming the neighborhood with a troop of other kids for companionship and protection.
Would her children be ripped from her arms to grow up in foster care as a result?
