“Do you ever not have that thing on?”
“What? The scanner?” he asks as he turns onto the highway.
“Yes.”
He shrugs. “Does it bug you?”
“Not really. I just don’t understand why you still listen to calls if you’re off duty.” I rub my feet together, and more sand from the playground comes off the soles of my shoes and dusts the floor mat.
“I have a few situations I like to keep an eye on. If a call goes out on one of those, sometimes I like to go so I can make sure what’s going on.”
“Hm.”
“Hm?”
“Sounds to me like someone is attached to—”
“Possible 10-16. 12662 Serenity Court. Officers responding.” The scanner interrupts.
“Son of a bitch,” Grant says as he slams the heel of his hand against the steering wheel.
“What’s a 10-16?” Whatever it is, it obviously isn’t good.
“I jinxed it by saying it,” he mutters to himself.
“Grant? Are you okay?” I stare at his profile and can see the disconcert in his posture.
“No. Yes. Fuck. This is the one case I’m worried about.” He glances my way, and I can see the hesitation in his body language. “I need to . . . shit. My cruiser.”
“If you’re worried, just drive there now. I can sit and wait out whatever you need to do. Don’t waste the time taking me back,” I ramble, hating that he is so upset about this call.
“You sure?” He eyes me in a way that says he knows more than I do, which is obvious, and yet, I’m not sure why he feels the need to relay it.
“Yes. Positive. Go.”
He grabs his cell, punches a few numbers, and then holds it to his ear, waiting. “Dispatch, I’m an off-duty officer responding to the call for 12662 Serenity Court,” he says. “Yes. Grant Malone . . . I’m in civilian clothes but want it known to the guys on scene that I’m responding . . . No. It’s an ongoing situation. I’ve been monitoring every call you have listed there . . . Yeah . . . I know, but I’m on my way. 10-4.”
It doesn’t take long to make it to the address, but that could be because Grant may or may not have completely demolished the speed limit.
When we pull onto the street and park beside two other cruisers, trepidation takes hold. I’m sure it will be cool seeing Grant in action, but at the same time, I feel like I’m eavesdropping on someone else’s life.
As if I’m violating their privacy by being here.
“Goddamnit,” he mutters as he slams the truck into park, flings the door open, and jogs up the front walkway.
Then I see her.
The little girl sits on a rock in the middle of a planter in the front yard with a teddy bear hugged tight to her chest. She’s looking down at her bear’s face, fingers picking at its eyes, as a big, burly police officer awkwardly tries to talk to her.
“Keely.” I hear Grant say the name, and the minute it is out of his mouth, she looks up. A ghost of a smile turns up the corners of her lips, but something about her face expresses a sadness so strong I can feel it deep in my bones.
Big, burly officer visibly relaxes and has no problem stepping back. Grant lowers himself to the ground and sits cross-legged beside her.
“Oh.” My hand flies up to cover my mouth, and tears sting my eyes at the mere sight of them. There is a comfort between them, a gentleness to him I never expected to see. He talks to her, pointing to her bear and the rocks in the planter around her. It’s so obvious from the outside how hard he is working to make her smile and put her at ease.
Curiosity has me glancing to the backs of the officers standing at the front door, but I can’t keep my eyes away from Grant and Keely for very long. There is something so precious and heartbreaking about their interaction. He dwarfs her, and yet, she seems completely at ease with him. They talk some, his expression so serious when she looks away and then warm when she comes back to him. He works for her smile, and when she grants it, there is a flicker of hope under all the shadows haunting her eyes.
It kills me. In every sense of the word.
Why does this little girl trust Grant so much? More so, why would a little girl know a police officer enough to trust him?
And then I remember the code 10-16—domestic abuse. Grant told dispatch that he’d been to every one of the previous calls to this address.
Every.
One.
How many times has he been here?
I push the thoughts and scenarios from my mind. I don’t want to think or assume, but it doesn’t stop the sting of tears in my eyes as he reaches out and holds her little hand in his.
Because it’s real. Grant’s hero complex and his need to save everyone is real, and I’m watching it firsthand.
He and Keely are pointing to the smaller rocks around them, and after a bit, I hear her giggle. It’s the most adorable sound in the world. All I can do is stare. And wonder. And hope she’s outside because whatever happened inside doesn’t involve her.
I’m not sure how long I sit and stare at the two of them, but it’s long enough that my feet are numb from their positioning and the sky has slowly faded to black. So lost in thought, I’m startled when Grant slides behind the wheel, starts the car, and pulls away from the curb.
“The fucker’s lucky he wasn’t home,” he mutters under his breath but doesn’t elaborate, and I don’t ask for more.
I turn some in my seat so I can study him and try to wrap my head around how the man, who seemed so at ease moments ago with a little girl, now feels like a ticking time bomb. The lights from passing cars and streetlamps lighten and darken the features of his face, leaving me to wonder what’s going on in that mind of his. I’d also love to pepper him with questions about what the call was all about, but for a woman who doesn’t like to answer questions herself, the safe strategy is to keep my mouth shut.
We drive for some time, winding up through the hills around Sunnyville until Grant pulls off the asphalt and onto a graded road. We continue for a ways, and it’s only when he pulls into a clearing that overlooks the city and all of its lights below that I know where we are: Grant’s place he goes to think.
Our silence stretches, long and thick and heavy, but with the windows down, the sounds of the nightlife around us soften the tension in it. Every part of me wants to ease whatever is upsetting him but I have no clue how to even begin to do that.
“You want to talk about it?” I ask, hoping enough time has passed that he can think rationally about whatever happened.
His sigh is heavy. “I’m not sure that I can.”
“Because it’s a case?”
Without answering, Grant opens the door and gets out of the truck. I watch him pace back and forth, the moonlight above accentuating the tension seizing his posture. I slip out of the cab and find a flat slope of rock near the front of his truck and take a seat, cross my legs, and focus on the twinkling lights of the city. They almost look like embers burning in the bottom of a fire pit, and I wonder what each of those lights represent.
Is one of them Keely’s?
How many of them hide the horror happening beneath their cover?
I shake the thought away. Too much thinking for tonight. Too much delving into a past I don’t want to delve into.
“Remember the side of your house?” Everything inside me freezes. The minute I’m determined to get out of my own past, he brings me right back into it. “Remember how we used to go and sit there and play whatever the hell we used to play back then because you wanted to get outside? Sometimes, you’d paint those rocks of yours with silly pictures, other times I’d play Barbies with you. I hated it, but I played because you were always playing cops and robbers with me?”
“No.” I whisper the word, not sure if it’s because I don’t want to remember or because I don’t want to talk about it.
Either he doesn’t hear me or he doesn’t care, because he keeps talking. “After you left, I used to go there. I’d just sit there by myself because I missed you so much. I’d pretend that you were inside and you were going to come out to play any minute.”
Every part of me wants to reject what he’s saying. I want to cover my ears like the little girl he remembers would have done and shut him out. I don’t want to know that he was hurt, too. It’s so much easier to think I was the only one who hurt. It’s so much easier to remember how much I hated him for pulling my world apart instead of looking at it like an adult and realizing he did the right thing.
But I don’t lift my hands. I don’t turn to face him. I need to hear this. I need to listen to him. I need to face what I don’t want to know and am scared to death to remember.
“I missed you, Em. You were my best friend. You were the one I told all my silly secrets to. You were part of my every day, and then you were gone . . .”
I told him my secrets, too. But mine were far from any secret an eight-year-old should have.
I push up from where I’m seated and walk a few feet away from him, hating the hurt in his voice that somehow I had a part in putting there. But at the same time, I’m angry at him for driving me up here where I can’t exactly escape the conversation.
Was this his plan? Trap me here and force me to talk?
“Do you remem—”
“What are getting at, Grant? What’s the point to this conversation?”
“I just—” He shakes his head and runs a hand through his hair. “There are so many things I want to ask you, so many things that I want to know—”
“They’re none of your goddamn business!” I shout in an explosion of temper I’m not sure he was expecting.
“No?” he shouts back, crossing the distance and getting in my face just as unexpectedly.
“No.” I stand my ground.
“Oh, so, what? You’ll open your legs for me but not yourself?” His eyes burn with anger as we wage a visual war of contempt.
“Fuck. You.”
“That’s the point,” he sneers. “That’s all you want to do.”
“And?”
“And what?
“That was the deal, Malone. You agreed to the rules.”
“The deal’s changed.”
“Then the deal’s over.”
“No. I call bullshit on you. Why can’t you let me in? Why can’t you just talk to me? I know you went through a shit ton of horror, but I was the one who was there. I was the one who cared about you. Who still cares. And maybe I need to talk about it to wrap my head around how you dealt with all of that and turned out so goddamn normal when it still fucks my head up some days . . . did you think of that?”
I fist my hands and grit my teeth as I try to calm the riot of confusion laced anger swirling around inside me. “So you’d rather I be messed up too just so you can feel better? Well, I am,” I scream at him, hating to admit it but needing the catharsis of saying it. “Did that work? Do you feel better?” I sneer as every part of me vibrates with fury and shame.
“No.” His voice is barely a whisper.
“You don’t want inside my head, Grant. You don’t want to know what’s in the dark places there. It crippled me at one time. It sits there and waits for its moment to come forward and cripple me again. So, I shove it away. I don’t talk about it. I try not to think about it. Because if I do, then I can’t function. I can’t be the woman you see when I live in the shadow of what happened to the little girl I was. That past doesn’t exist to me. It can’t.”
I walk away from him, needing to process my outburst, my confession, and how I can still seem strong to him when suddenly I feel so damn weak. Looking out at the city, Grant at my back, I cross my arms over my chest and dig my nails into my biceps. I welcome the bite of pain. I use it to calm myself and bring me back to the woman I pretend to be.
“Emerson.” He says my name again. It’s a plea. A request. It’s pity. “I’m sorry.”
“You don’t get it do you?” His apology only serves to aggravate me further. To remind me of all those shrinks and their sympathetic eyes and the pity in their tones. The one sound I never wanted to hear again. My temper rages quietly beneath the surface, and I’m not sure if I’m mad at him for pushing me or mad at myself for what I said.
It takes all my effort to make my voice even and calm—unaffected—when I turn to look at him and speak, but there’s still a bite to my tone. “Look, I’m sorry you can’t talk about the little girl because it’s police procedure, but that doesn’t give you the right to start poking into my past. Into my life. I don’t need to be saved.”
“I’m not talking about her because it’s police procedure, Emerson.” He throws his hands up and laughs but there is nothing amusing in its sound. “Don’t you get it? I’m not talking about her because I can’t. I’m not talking about her because I don’t want to upset you! A lot of fucking good that did me.”
I startle at his words. “Excuse me?”
“I don’t want to upset you,” he says softer this time, his voice vulnerable, his body defeated.
“After everything I’ve been through, I assure you, you can’t upset me.” And I truly want to believe that, but I already know it’s an untruth. Grant Malone serves to be the one person capable of hurting me the most.
“I can’t? How is that—”
“Nope. Nothing does,” I lie, hoping he leaves it be and doesn’t call me on the fact that I just admitted differently moments ago.
He angles his head to the side and stares at me. His silent scrutiny unnerving.
“So, if I told you I think Keely’s dad is abusing her but I have no proof to go on, you’d be okay with that? What if I told you I used our rock secret? That I stop by there more often than I should to make sure there is no rock painted like a watermelon, which is her signal to tell me she needs help. You’re telling me none of that triggers anything for you?”
I stare at him with my head shaking and my mind rejecting everything he just said, even the stuff I don’t understand. All I can think of is that beautiful little girl with the tear-stained face and the haunted eyes and wonder if that was what I looked like to everyone who saw me.
“No.” I whisper the word, but my body burns with shame as I dig my nails deeper into my flesh.
“No?” he shouts, finally losing his cool. “How, Em? How is that possible?”
“Because it is, okay?” I yell back, itching for a fight to cover the emotions overwhelming me. “Screw it. Just take me home.”
“No.” The muscle pulses in his clenched jaw as his body visibly vibrates with anger.
“Yes.”
“Why?” he demands.
“Because you make me feel, damn it! You make me feel when I don’t want to feel, Grant. And being numb is how I deal, so please,” I say, my voice breaking and almost turning into a sob, “take me home.”
I see the minute my desperation hits him. His anger dissipates. His shoulders sag. His eyes fall vulnerable. And then he walks to the driver’s side of the truck and climbs in, doing as I asked without saying another word.