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Right. Right. Okay. Yeah. I’d watched enough cop shows on TV to know the routine, even if all this still felt like an out-of-body experience. I nodded, and the cop stood, saying something into his radio before looking back at me. “Do you want to ride downtown with me?”
Transitioning Savannah from my car to his would delay the process. Driving when I was this upset wasn’t ideal, but it was better than the alternative of sitting in the front seat of a patrol car crying my eyes out. “No. I can follow you.”
“Okay,” he said, walking back to his squad car.
I got back in and closed the door, moving on autopilot.How is this real?
In the back seat, Savannah was still sleeping, unaware her mommy was gone. Oh God. Sadness threatened to choke me once more, but I staved it off. I couldn’t fall apart. Not yet. I needed to keep it together, for her.
As I waited for the cop to turn around, I grabbed my phone and scrolled furiously through my notes, hands trembling worse than ever, until I reached the one titled “Savannah—Emergency Contact.” Darkness settled heavy as a shroud around me as I stared at it.
Alexis had given me the name with an embarrassed laugh, saying that she was being paranoid and ridiculous, but I could tell that there was real fear behind her lighthearted façade. Why didn’t I push her top open up to me?
Tears stung my eyes, but I blinked them away fast.
Jesus.
How the hell do you tell someone you haven’t seen in ten years that he might be the father of a six-month-old baby he never knew existed?
* * *
A train whistle blew in the distance. Eerie and lonesome, piercing the late afternoon like shrapnel.
I’d been standing on this platform for a long time. Too long. Shit. The people there must’ve thought I was an idiot, missing first one train, then two. Now, the last one to Harpers Ferry was on the way and I needed to be on it.
Pacing back and forth in front of the security guard, who was looking more nervous each time I passed. I had a good foot on him, maybe more, and he was probably worried about my suspicious behavior. Hell,I’dbe on alert if I was watching me. I tried to convince myself that I wanted to do this. It wasn’t working out so well.
My SEAL team had insisted I return to my hometown on the anniversary of my family’s deaths. To make peace with it, they said. For closure. Whatever. I’d made my peace a decade ago when I’d enlisted, and I’d never looked back since.
Fuck it. I was going back to DC. I grabbed my duffel bag and had made it as far as the exit when my cell phone buzzed in my pocket. I pulled it out, expecting to see one of my teammates’ names on the screen. I planned to make up some excuse for not going home, then maybe hit a bar tonight, let loose, have some fun. It was my leave time. Why not?
Instead, though, my screen showed a number I didn’t recognize, with a Harpers Ferry area code. Confused and intrigued, I answered, against my better judgment. If it was spam, I’d just hang up. “Hello?”
A woman on the other end of the line started talking, her words rushed together like she was in a hurry—or a panic. I’d seen people lose their composure on the battlefield plenty of times and knew the difference. This sounded like the latter. Frowning, I stepped away from the exit so as not to block the way, then concentrated on what the woman was saying.
“This is Charlotte Rhodes. Do you remember me?”
Charlotte Rhodes. The name sounded familiar. It had been a long time ago, but I ran through the people I’d gone to school with, and yep. There she was. Tall, brown hair, pretty. We hadn’t been best friends, but we’d hung around with the same group of people growing up. My gut tightened. Why was she calling now? Quite a coincidence. Except I didn’t believe in coincidence. “Uh, hey. I remember you. What’s going on?”
Normally, a call like this might make a person think something had happened to a family member, but I didn’t have any. So yeah. I knew it wasn’t that kind of call.
“I’ve become friends with a woman you knew,” Charlotte continued. “Alexis Barnes.”
I racked my brain again. Alexis Barnes. That name took longer. I finally remembered a woman I’d hooked up with in DC the last night I’d been back on leave, over a year ago. She’d been sweet. Had a bad, stalker-ish situation going on with her ex or something. I just remembered a lot of calls and texts coming in while we’d been trying to get to know each other better at the bar. “Sure. I remember her. What’s up?”
“She’s dead.”
Oh. That knocked me back a step. Literally. My back hit the wall, and my duffel hit the floor at the same time. It wasn’t that I’d known her that well or anything, just the shock of it. You’d think I’d be used to it by now, but nope.
“She gave me this number to contact if anything bad ever happened to her,” Charlotte said, a definite wobble in her tone now, like she was trying not to cry.
“Okay.” I raked a hand through my buzz-cut hair and scowled at the floor. This made no sense at all. We’d hooked up one time. We barely knew each other, other than in the biblical sense. We’d spent less than forty-eight hours together. I shook my head and said the first thing that popped into my head. “Why me?”
Charlotte took a deep breath, a beat or two of silence hanging between us. I felt like I lived and died in those seconds. A familiar fight or flight instinct kicked up inside of me. Like I could sense an electrical storm coming, because the hairs on the back of my neck stood up. The next thing she said changed my life forever. “You have a daughter, Gabe. She’s not quite six months old, and her name is Savannah.”
“What?” I said, for lack of anything better. Then, “Oh, fuck.”
Way to be eloquent, dude.
