Page 50 of Oddly Fine

“She’s an amazing grandmother, but she hates you. Hates you for making her son the ‘woman of the relationship,’ hates you for being a man, hates you for being absent—you name it, she hates it.” Hayes listed Gill’s multiple transgressions clearly and concisely—just another fucking day in the office.

Beckett was looking increasingly uncomfortable but also somewhat amused. Since he didn’t seem to know what corner of the room would be safe to hide in, he stayed still and silent—not unlike an appeaser feeding a crocodile in hopes of being eaten last.

“I don’t recall asking for your input,” Gill stated coldly, a clear example of the wall he’d erected between himself and his staff. That wall had been like granite when they first started working for him. Impenetrable. Flawless. Now? It was nothing but a chain link fence. A barrier was still in place, but they could see right through it.

Hayes shrugged and kept going, thinking it highly unlikely that Gill was going to fire (or shoot) either of them over this situation, despite his icy demeanor.

“Lilac got scared when she heard scratching in her room. She came downstairs to fetch Beckett. When he heard the same sound, he sent her out of the room, flipped the bed onto its side, and that’s when he found the nest hidden underneath,” Hayes said, resuming his factual account of the events surrounding the raccoon incident, ignoring Gill’s resistance to hearing what he had to say.

“How?” Gill asked, rubbing his forehead anxiously, apparently struggling with the very idea that a family of raccoons had been living beneath his daughter’s bed and he’d had no knowledge of it until now.

“Lilac told the cops you had people over to wash the windows a month or so ago. Apparently, you took the screen down but never put it back up. She frequently opens her window because she likes her bedroom extra chilly in the winter and—”

“And the fucking raccoons were freezing so the mother made a nest under her bed,” Gill concluded with a sigh.

“You don’t sound surprised,” Hayes observed.

Gill looked out the window, noticeably relieved now that he fully understood what had happened. It was difficult to tell how old the man truly was, perhaps somewhere between 50 and 60. And even then, he might be younger, but with the weight of the world pressing down on his shoulders—

“She’s been telling me about the scratching for days,” Gill admitted, voice strained. His eyes focused on Hayes, as if seeking his understanding for his part in this. “I told her to stop making it up.”

Beckett made a sound that was a cross between a grunt and a growl.

Gill’s shoulders slumped with self-disgust and regret.

No one spoke for several minutes. What could they say? Hayes knew very little about his boss. But what he did know was that Gill, just like Beckett and himself, had spent years in war zones, on constant alert, waiting to be gunned down. They knew battle. They knew chaos. And they knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that nothing killed a man faster than suspicion and fear.

He could only imagine how easy it must be for a man like Gill to feel the need to resist feelings of paranoia when his young daughter claimed to be hearing monsters under her bed.

After all, weren’t there monsters lurking under his own goddamned bed?

But no way would Gill let those monsters into his home. Into his fucking house. So he’d told his daughter there were no monsters. Just floorboards that creaked because of wear and tear.

As Hayes took in his boss’s heartbroken expression, he too wanted to cry.

“Animal Control said it was a very unusual situation. Raccoons almost never nest inside houses. They think the mother was used to being around people, or that the extremely low temperatures drove her to hide inside,” Hayes said, hoping that by rationalizing this situation, Gill could shake off his guilt.

“But I still failed to replace the screen on the window in my daughter’s room,” he said with a defeated sigh.

During his time working for Gill, Hayes had seen many different sides of his boss. But he did not know this one. Nor did he know how to handle it.

“I thought your mother-in-law was a 6-foot assailant,” Beckett said, like shoving that little tidbit of ridiculousness in Gill’s face would be helpful in some way.

“Donna hates me,” Gill acknowledged with a heavy sigh. “She thinks I made Riley gay. She hates me. Hates me. She’s gonna blame me for the raccoons nesting in the house.” He looked up at them without a trace of his normal confidence when he was planning a mission. Instead, he wore the emotionally devastated expression of a person who was watching their life go up in flames.

Hayes wasn’t sure how to reassure him since he was pretty sure Gill was right.

“The cops are gone,” Riley announced, suddenly appearing in the doorway. He paused to study their grim expressions and hurriedly added, “Please don’t kill my mother. She’s paranoid—you know it’ll lead back to you, Gill.” He laughed lightly, but there was a serious note underlying his words.

“She is probably drafting our divorce papers even as we speak,” Gill stated flatly with an intense look at his better half.

“I mean—maybe not quite yet—she’d probably get in touch with a lawyer, but nothing beyond that,” Riley replied with a weak smile.

While he was certainly teasing, there was a certain undertone that conveyed this was an old argument. He walked over to Gill and wrapped his arms tightly around him in a move to comfort him that Hayes immediately recognized, since he and Beckett tended to do the same thing for each other in tough situations.

“You forgot to book a babysitter,” Riley said, while resting his head on Gill’s shoulder and staring straight at Hayes. There was no anger in his stare. Nor resentment. Just resignation mixed with humor.

“Yes,” Gill admitted.