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Leaving the office, I saw Cal in the waiting room, flipping through some car magazine, then standing when he saw me.
“Got what you needed?”
“I have no idea,” I answered honestly. As we walked out to his truck, the sun was fading into purples. He opened the truck door and helped me in.
“It’s a key, but I don’t know to what.”
Cal glanced at it and started the engine. “It’s small. Some kind of lockbox? A safe maybe?”
I shrugged. “It’s from roughly ten years ago, so I have no idea. If he had a safe, Anita would have found it by now.”
“It may not be a safe then. We can do some research.”
I smiled at him. The term “we” made my body feel less heavy, and it was another one of those split seconds I forgot the real world. With a deep breath, the despair came back as realization of the last week hit home.
Could I ever move on from Cal? From Jack?
No.
I knew that to be true. The question was, how do I survive in the meantime?
Cal’s phone pinged. He grabbed it out of his pocket and read a text. “Jack is done in an hour and will meet us at home.”
Meet us at home? This wasn’t some sleepover party. While the idea sounded amazing for the simplest of seconds, this wasn’t a situation that I’d say was conventional, nor was Jack’s home my home.
I didn’t have a home, actually.
But family? Friends? All of that was scattered few and far between, leaving me longing for the w
ord home while being sucker-punched with the reality that even if I had a roof of my own, there was no one to fill it with.
I looked at Cal. So familiar, riding in his truck, his tattoos peeked out from beneath his T-shirt sleeve. A couple weeks ago we would have gone to his home, he would have made me feel like I belonged there, and I’d kiss every inch of ink he had. But this wasn’t a couple weeks ago.
“Smile for me, Kitten.”
“What?” I asked.
He glanced at me when we turned down Jack’s street. “I can’t handle you looking at me like that.”
Whatever look I was giving wasn’t a good one, and I didn’t want Cal thinking I was a wreck. Even though I was. Call it pride or stupidity, but I was trying to at least give the impression that I could somehow manage being a functioning human. So far, it was challenging.
“Remember when you were at Bea’s with me and she brought out the scrapbooks?”
I smiled, even laughed a little recalling the memory. “Yeah, page after page of naked baby pictures.”
He looked at me and smiled back. He’d gotten what he wanted. What he’d asked of me. A smile.
But his expression turned serious quickly when we pulled up to Jack’s and saw the window smashed, the door busted open, and the alarm going off.
“Stay here,” Cal said.
The blaring noise from the security system was screaming and shards of glass picking up flecks of light were shimmering in the grass.
“Wait, no!”
“The police are dispatched as soon as the alarm goes off. They’re not here yet, which means it just happened and the asshole is still inside,” he said, as he got out of the truck and headed toward the house.
“Cal, stop!” But he was already bounding through the front door.
