AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Wait. Here.” Before circling the table, Fletch snags a piece of clean paper and offers it to me across the fake mahogany tabletop. Handing me a pen, he straightens his back and grins. “Write down who you think killed Holly. Don’t tell me who,” he rushes out. “I’ll do the same and not tell you. Then, when this is done, we’ll compare and see if you’ve still got the cotton brain.”
I stare at him for a moment. Frowning, because my partner acts like everything in life is a game.
“You’re kidding, right?”
“I’m totally not.” He makes a big show of covering his paper and scribbling a few words down. Then he tosses the pen to the table and folds the sheet. Once. Twice. Three times. Glancing up with an expectant expression, he waits. “You do yours. I wanna know that you’re well enough to be back.”
“How does this prove anything?” I lean over the table and write down the one name that flashes in my mind like a neon sign. It shouldn’t make sense, but I can’t dismiss them no matter which way I try to spin it.
Adding a full stop at the end and dropping the pen, I stand tall again, groaning past the pain that radiates through my shoulder and back, then I fold my sheet and slap it to Fletch’s chest. “Don’t peek till we’re done.”
“Not peeking.” Pleased, he twists and pins both guesses to the wall. “I won’t look. You don’t look. We’ll see what it says at the end.”
“Fine.” Turning away from the room, I shuffle my way through the door and hold it open for my partner to come through behind me.
It’s late again, another night Fletch wasn’t home to put Mia to bed. But he does his best to be with her when he can, and he has a trusted nanny with her whenever he can’t.
Penny has proven herself over this past week to be exactly who the family needs. That doesn’t mean she isn’t watched; it doesn’t mean she’s given complete freedom, or that Fletch doesn’t have a baby cam on the wall above Mia’s bed so he can check in on her every hour on the hour. But her existence means he gets to be cop and dad. It means he can take a genuine swing at this thing called single parenthood while his ex-wife extends her stay inside Copeland’s rehab facility.
“Have you talked to Jada this week?” My steps are slow. My body aches. I’m running on less blood than I should be, I’m in pain, and I’m exhausted beyond anything I’ve ever felt before. But I’m healing, even if that means limping my way out of the police station at three in the damn morning. “How’s she doing?”
“I called her on Monday,” he mumbles. “She’s not my biggest fan.”
“She still mad you put her in there?”
“She’s stillenragedI put her in there.” Dropping his hands in his pockets, he precedes me onto the escalator that cuts through the multistory precinct and takes us to the front doors. “She’s a proud woman, Arch. And she’s an addict.”
“She’ll thank you one day.”
He barks out a laugh that draws the attention of cops using the up escalator. Still, his eyes stay on his feet. “Maybe. In a really,reallylong time. She wants us to get married again, Arch. She wants to check herself out of rehab and have us go back to being a normal family.” When we reach the bottom of the escalator, we step off together and head toward the front door. “She reckons that if we can have that life back, she won’t slip into old habits.”
“So… marry her, or it’s your fault she’s a junkie?”
“Pretty much.” Moving through the doors and stopping on the sidewalk outside, his pain-filled, honeycomb-colored eyes come up to meet mine.
“You said no?”
He glances down again. “I said no. I don’t want to marry her. I don’t want to be with her. And I definitely don’t want her sobriety to hang on our relationship, when all my energy goes to raising our daughter. We’re not suited for each other anymore. I fell out of love a while ago, Arch.”
Exhausted, he shrugs. “I can love her as the mother of my child, and I can support her the very best I can, because Mia needs a healthy mom just as much as she needs me. But I won’t spend my life with a woman I don’t want.”
“I think that’s the right decision.” Reaching across with my good hand, I clap his shoulder and squeeze for just a moment. “Mia’s who you’ve gotta think of now. You’re doing the right thing.”
Scoffing, he reaches across and claps my shoulder in return—but his force, on my injury, sends bolts of fire surging through my blood. Bile in my throat. Lava in my stomach.
“Argh!” I shake him off and stumble back a step. “Fuck, Fletch!”
“I’m sorry!” Grinning, he raises both hands in faux surrender. It’s not surrender at all. It’shands up, ready to fight. “I forgot.”
“You forgot? I had a bullet in my fucking shoulder!”
“Don’t say that too loud,” he snickers and peeks back at the station. “The official line was, what? Basketball injury?”
“Asshole.” I step around him and move in the direction of Minka’s apartment. “You’re lucky it’s the middle of the fucking night, or I might have enough energy to slam you for that.”
“I said I was sorry!” He walks backwards, laughing at my expense. “Take six hours, Malone. I’ll come by your place at nine so we can get started.”
“Fuck you, Detective Fletcher. Prick.”
