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At the beginning, riding high on the praise from new fans, I’d written relentlessly, day and night, often waking up in the middle of the night to get more words written.
Those first three years, I wrote seven books total.
Once our son was born, I’d needed to slow down.
But once he’d gotten on more of a schedule, the writing bug had bitten me in the butt again, producing another three books during the course of my pregnancy. Which would allow for an elongated “maternity leave” while I enjoyed time with my little girl.
I was making easily double what I was making as a physical therapist, even working half or a third as much as I used to.
I wasn’t surprised to find that a lot of my fanbase was women who enjoyed the stories where the heroines always got the bad guys in the end.
True crime was almost always focusing on the perpetrators.
I framed the focus away from them in fiction.
I wouldn’t declare my love of true crime had diminished, per se. But I was much more selective in what I consumed now, refusing to give my eyes and ears to any content creator who focused too much on the killers and not enough on the victims or survivors.
My hand went to my belly, wondering if our baby girl would consume true crime as she got older. If she might come across content framed around the man who’d tormented me.
We would raise her to be prepared and aware. Wells’s job also made him hyper-aware of the dangers of the world. Especially toward young women. He’d already made me agree to putting her into martial arts as soon as she was old enough.
Yes, we hated the idea of having to do that.
Or to bring children into a world where they could be victims.
I’d really struggled with that before we’d decided to start trying to have children.
It had been Gawen, over dinner one night, who’d convinced me otherwise, who told me how important it was to bring moregoodpeople into the world to balance out the bad.
For all we knew, our kids would grow up to catch bad guys like their father. Or become the psychologists who would heal the cracks in someone’s soul before they lashed out and hurt someone else.
Whatever they wanted to do, I was sure they would bring goodness into the world. And that was all a parent could hope for with their children.
“How was work?” I asked, following Wells into the kitchen as Hector kept nudging his head under his hand.
Out back, we had the most recent NBPD K9 unit fail.
A sweet, droopy-eared Bloodhound who was meant to sniff for heroin, but only seemed capable of following his nose in the direction of any food in the vicinity. Even if that meant leaping over a fence, and stealing it off of someone’s picnic table.
We joked a lot about needing to move to a bigger house just to accept all the police dog fails. Honestly, we were only half-joking about that.
Ever since the day I brought Matilda home, I had fallen head-over-heels in love with dogs.
And, yes, as a mom with small kids at home, I absolutely enjoyed the security that larger, intimidating-looking dogs provided.
“It was… work,” he said, evasively. “You didn’t see the news?” he asked.
“Oh, no. I try not to watch it when our walking sponge is awake,” I told him. “Something bad happened?” I asked.
“Domestic gone really bad,” he said, exhaling hard, and shaking his head.
I knew that since the beginning, domestic calls or cases were the ones that tended to get to Wells the most. The helplessness of it all, because the abuser almost always got his victim to come back, and he was powerless to do anything about it, knowing that it was likely only going to get worse. Until, sometimes, this type of thing happened.
I knew, to an extent, Wells couldn’t talk about the details of the case. What’s more, he didn’t want to talk about the case.
He wanted to come home and let all that ugly slip away.
He wanted to get lost in the good.
