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This weird as fuck man beside me.
He let go of my leg to close the laptop and push it back under the dash.
“We’re going to get moving again,” Utah said. “Apparently, we’re running short on time now.”
He reached for the button to end the call.
“Wait,” Memphis choked. The noise that came out of Utah in response to her voice sounding that way even made my heart fucking hurt for him.
“It gets worse,” she said and cleared her throat. “We’ve been looking into what happened to Jersey’s family.”
I leaned forward to put my face in my hands to try to prepare myself for whatever might be coming. Utah sighed and leaned his head back against the headrest to close his eyes.
“There’s no way it happened the way that the police reports said it did,” she said. “They didn’t even investigate it like there could have been other motives, other people involved. Anyone who killed that many people with the same gun just to turn that gun on themselves, would’ve had a worthwhile amount of residue from the gun itself to show that it had gone that way. And it’s common to inspect clothing for things like that. There’s nothing that suggests they did any testing at all on Liz’s clothes. Nothing that suggests her clothes were even kept for evidence.”
“Get me the names of the detectives who handled it,” Utah said.
“That’s not why —,” Memphis started to say.
“Indy,” Utah interrupted.
“Sending it all to your computer now, hoss.”
“Guys, that’s not the point,” Memphis tried again. “When you get to Jersey —. He already looked so —,” she stopped again when her voice cracked.
“We won’t say anything to him,” Utah finished for her. “This one stays between all of us until everybody’s back in that house. We’ll figure it out then.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
jersey
THEN
Liz was devastated from the moment that I’d suggested it. She didn’t say a single word. She didn’t burst into tears. She didn’t yell or throw things. Any of those reactions would have been preferable to her just walking away, but she never behaved that way. I’d known her for years and to this day, I’d still never heard her yell. Even when we did get into serious fights, she never yelled. She never told me to leave or to find somewhere else to sleep. She didn’t have it in her to act that way. She felt big and devastating emotions, but she felt them alone. She took them with her every time she walked away from a heated discussion.
This one hadn’t even had the chance to get heated though. This one cut her straight to the heart and she opted not to participate in it at all from that moment. She went straight to the baby’s room and disappeared inside. I wouldn’t take the conversation in there because Faith was asleep, and those minutes when she did actually sleep were so fucking precious that they couldn’t be interrupted. But Liz hiding from that discussion didn’t mean it was over. It was necessary, and she knew it too.
My next deployment was coming up and Liz hadn’t been in the kind of headspace where she could care for herself and an infant from the moment Faith was born. She still spent more days being down than she did being even just okay. She’d given up trying to breastfeed because I was the one doing most of the feedings. I was the one doing most of the diaper changes, most of the rocking to sleep, most of the comforting. At this point, I was confident enough in my ability to swaddle so tightly that I could’ve wrapped a live badger in a baby blanket and not have to worry about it escaping.
I didn’t mind carrying the weight while I was home. I really couldn’t think of a more worthwhile way to spend my time than by being with my own baby as often as I could. I had no way to know how much time I’d really have with her. These kinds of deployments didn’t come with time limits. I wasn’t given a specific number of weeks or days to be overseas before I could return. We were given an assignment, and we came home when it was completed. Or we didn’t come home. That thought was all the more painful. I could have a child in this world who might grow up never actually knowing me. Faith was way too young to be able to keep these memories of her time with me, but I would lock that shit up in the very depths of who I was to make sure I never forgot it.
* * *
Liz came to sit on my lap on the couch later that night. She straddled me and put both arms around my neck to just lay her head against my shoulder, rather than actually look at me. We’d come to an understanding early in our marriage that I’d leave her alone when she really needed to be left alone, but she had to come back to me every time.
“I know you’re right,” she whispered into my neck. “I just hate that you’re right.”
“Spoken like a true wife. My husband wasn’t wrong like I wanted him to be,” I said and chuckled while I squeezed her whole body against mine. “Can we talk about it and figure it out? Or is this more of a just hold me and shut up kind of moment?”
“We need to figure it out. You won’t be here much longer.”
Her whole body shook when she said the words so I pushed her off my chest until I could hold her face in both my hands.
“My parents would never keep her from you, Liz. Never. I’ve already talked to them about it. They don’t mind if you go stay with them too until I get back.”
“I know they wouldn’t,” she said, and the tears broke loose. There were so many that my thumbs couldn’t even keep up.
“Maybe we shouldn’t have done this. Maybe I wasn’t ready for a baby at all. Your parents shouldn’t be responsible for this. You shouldn’t be having to do so much of it alone,” she collapsed forward on me again.
