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Out of all the places that I’d expected to find her, that place definitely wasn’t it.
But there I was, looking at her across the large atrium, her eyes glued to her iPad.
It’d taken me one year to get here.
One long year of searching for her.
It all started with an email I’d sent to myself, knowing she would read it. I’d had no other way to contact her since she’d gone completely off the grid.
Not even Morrigan had seen or talked to her. It’d been so unexpected, according to Morrigan, that her heart was broken.
I could say the same.
Which was embarrassing to say, to be completely honest.
There I was, a forty-one-year-old man, and all I could do for the past year was think about her.
Surprisingly, at first, I’d thought that she was going to feed me information, giving me a guess on where she went and what she was doing. Or hell, even why she’d done it.
But there was nothing.
The only thing she did that let me know that she was there was her rooting around in my life through the walls of cyberspace like she’d done before. Everything would be exactly as I’d left it, though there’d be highlights in all of my notes and notes on my notes as if I’d made the notes myself but hadn’t.
The first time it’d happened, I’d been confused. The second I realized that was her way of “helping” me without actually appearing there to work.
Eventually, I’d be sent news articles from anonymous sources that would help something ping in my brain when it came to a case, and from there, things started to line up on my end. We’d solved three cold cases this year, ones that’d been so cold that not even a speck of light could be seen.
Of those three cases, one that’d been solved had even managed to find a young boy alive.
That boy was fourteen and had been living with his parents for years now. He only knew his “parents” to be his parents.
What he didn’t know was at the age of six months old, the boy had been taken from a convenience store parking lot while the mother filled her tires up with air. While she’d been down on the ground filling it up, the wife of the thief had come around the opposite side and taken the child.
Due to video surveillance not being as advanced thirteen years ago and the positioning of the car at the time, nobody was able to see a thing. Hell, the mother hadn’t even noticed her child missing until she’d gotten home to take him out of his car seat.
The no-lead thing had gone on for fourteen years until I’d gotten the file placed on my desk, with the mother telling me she was sent my way by a girl that was described as “beautiful” but “quirky.” A girl with long brown hair, brown eyes and answered to Folsom.
The worst part was solving this case and standing in front of a news crew, telling them about how I found the boy and how nobody had helped. That feeling, the telling of that lie, was like a boulder in my gut that felt like it got heavier and heavier every day. But I knew, deep down in my gut, that she’d wanted to keep her involvement quiet.
I’d always known she was running from something, but I still hadn’t figured out what.
The year had gone totally unplanned.
What I could tell you was I was pissed.
I was pissed about how she’d left.
Pissed about how I cared.
And pissed that I suddenly found myself with an attachment to someone that, a year ago, two years ago, had driven me fuckin’ batshit nuts.
Yet, she was the first thing that I could think about when I opened my eyes and the last thing when I closed them.
She and that kid had been in a constantly running loop in my brain.
Like, why was I fucking worried about what she was doing? Whether she was okay? Was JP okay? Had JP grown?
Hell, we even talked on my notes app through my phone.
