Page 14 of Not Mine to Rescue

“You obviously don’t have a brother who is immune to embarrassment.”

“I’m an only child.”

Lemon nodded sagely. “That tracks. You’re confident and give off that vibe. Plus, your aura is yellow. It’s logical, but intuitive. Only children often have to figure things out by themselves.”

I blinked.

Lemon shifted her eyes away. “I take it you don’t believe in auras.”

Not really. It was difficult to acknowledge something I’d never experienced, but I believed in visual and nonvisual cues. It happened all the time in my line of work. A subtle shift in tone, the pace of speech slows to keep up with the lie the mind forms, hesitation, a squaring of the shoulders as if bracing, or even a shift from contractions to more formal patterns. You could read a lot into those things. But seeing colors? No. “That would be really helpful if I could, but…”

She picked up my awkward hesitation. “Just because you can’t see things doesn’t mean they don’t exist. Oxygen? Germs?”

“Point taken.” I could keep an open mind about her and her brother. I needed to because I was running out of options for Molly.

Hours later I was home with Molly, going over my caseload for the upcoming week when Jim called.

“Hi.” I braced for another argument.

“Hey.” His voice sounded tired, almost sad. In the few heartbeats I hesitated to talk, the worst-case scenarios ran through my head like a nightmare.

“Is Denise okay?” I finally asked.

He sighed. “She’s hooked up to monitors.”

That was not good. “The baby?”

“Just fine.”

An anvil sunk in my stomach. I was happy for him, right? “That’s good. What’s wrong? Should I ask?”

“Her blood pressure, swelling… They’re keeping her overnight.”

I listened hard for the telltale sounds of a hospital. “Are you at home?”

“Yeah. She needs rest.”

She’s all alone in the hospital, and you called me? I bit down on my anger so it wouldn’t come through in my reply. This wasn’t about us, or the way he abandoned me. Although I couldn’t help but see the parallels. I changed the subject away from that topic just to be safe. “Molly is doing well. We visited a doggie day care today.”

“About that.”

His tone shifted to the clipped, no-nonsense one he used for contract negotiations when they went south and he needed to fire legal bullets into someone. I braced.

“She tore up the couch. She’s not adjusting well at all, Honey.”

Another one? I turned my head to look at my pretty girl. She was curled on a sleeping pad that had a place of honor in the quietest corner of the room. It was elevated with a ramp leading to it and a slight lip so the pad wouldn’t shift as she settled in. The height was tall enough that she could see me on the bed. It was reassuring to see her content like that. She hadn’t even woken up when the phone rang.

Funny, she never tore up my couches.

“How much?”

“It was a two thousand dollar set.”

My first reaction was to fire back, “You don’t expect me to buy the whole set?” But I counted to three, then five, instead. “Are you only going to replace the couch?”

His growl was not reassuring. “I think maybe it’s time to revisit custody.”

I saw red.