Once morning arrived, Shepard had to get to the hospital. It was the first time Shepard had slept over, and Nick could feel himself already addicted to the feeling of having him under the bed sheets. He hadn’t woken up so happy in months. He woke up a little earlier than Shepard’s alarm so that he could whip him up some pancakes and a nice cup of coffee. Emma was awake by that time, too, so Nick had her in the kitchen while he cooked. It was the perfect morning, and Nick was excited to continue the trend. They had already set another date at an outdoor mall next to Santa Monica beach in a couple of days, and Nick couldn’t wait.

But the day also brought with it other things. He knew he had to see Shepard’s cousin at the detective agency and he had to do it as soon as possible. Once they had their breakfast, he dropped Emma off at Anna’s place and drove to the location Shepard had given him. Nick walked up to the red-bricked two-story building, a wall of dark green ivy climbing up the left side and reaching toward the center, where a sign read “Stonewall Investigations”. It felt like a building picked up from the New York streets of Gossip Girls and dropped into the middle of Los Angeles, on a residential street in Century City. There was a subtle rainbow crossing through the center of the sign above the door, adding a touch that Nick appreciated. He understood that gay rights and LGBTQ people were more and more accepted as each day passed, but that didn’t mean he still wasn’t nervous about negative interactions, especially in businesses that were centered around revealing information and seeing the entire story. It certainly didn’t help that he already had an incredibly negative reaction coming from his dad, whom he had never had an issue with growing up. The last thing he wanted was to meet with a private detective who held some kind of secret bigotry and ended up sabotaging Nick’s case. This felt like his last resort. If he couldn’t prove that Anna was doing something shady, then he’d be stuck seeing Emma two days for the rest of his life, with the possibility of Anna doing something shady and trying for sole custody. He’d be devastated. He hoped that even if he didn’t find anything on Anna, that it wouldn’t come to him losing complete custody, but he had no idea what she was up to and he had stayed up way too late on quite a few nights, reading various different horror stories of parents losing their kids to a terrible spouse. Nick wanted to cover all the bases and make sure the judge was on his side. Besides, Nick wasn’t fine with the arrangement they had. Two days a week was nothing. It had to be changed to at least a fifty-fifty split.

Nick opened the heavy red wooden door, pulling on the white door handle. The exterior was all pretty picturesque, and the inside of the building didn’t disappoint either. He was expecting to step into a typical lobby, but instead Nick walked into a foyer that was furnished like someone was expecting to land the cover of a home and garden magazine. The floors were freshly polished dark wood. The walls were an extension of the exterior, wallpaper peeling away in strategic areas to reveal the red bricks underneath. There was a cozy feeling to the place that Nick enjoyed.

Am I even in the right place?

For a second, Nick forgot about the sign outside and thought he had strolled into some random (and beautifully decorated) house. Before he had time to question it any further, he was greeted by a bubbly guy wearing a casual gray sport jacket over a simple white shirt and jeans. He bounced more so than walked, a hand extended out for Nick to grab, which he did.

“You must be Dr. Nicholas White?”

“You can call me Nick,” he answered.

“Great to meet you, Nick! I’m Andrew, the office manager slash receptionist slash janitor slash assistant to Zane. He’s upstairs in his office,” Andrew turned on his heel and started walking. “Right this way.” Andrew led Nick through the hall, past a couple other rooms with their doors closed, name badges marking the detectives that worked inside each office. Nick liked the feeling he was more inside someone’s home than in the hub for detective work. It gave a kind of undercover feel to the place, like they were a secret operation inside of a spy film.

Zane’s office was on the top floor, reached after climbing the spiral staircase and walking a short distance down another hallway, toward a dark blue door that was left partly open. There was sunlight streaming in from behind, lighting up the hallway, the sunlight bouncing off the shiny floors. There were picture frames hanging on the walls, stylized photos of different city skylines held within each frame.

Andrew knocked on the door before he opened it further. “Hey, Zane, I’ve got Dr. White here to see you.”

“Perfect, thank you, Andrew.” The voice was deep, commanding. Nick smiled a thank you to Andrew as he stepped aside so that Nick could enter. Zane’s office carried a similar style to the rest of the building; classic, cozy, but with some modern touches to it. The floor changed to a gray concrete and the wall was mostly just exposed red brick. Picture frames also hung in this room, but they were all black and white photos of an extremely photogenic bulldog. There was a tall green plant growing out from a marble pot set next to a floor-to-ceiling window. Zane’s desk was against the side of the room. He sat behind it in a leather chair. As soon as Nick stepped into the room, he stood up and walked around the glass desk. He had a strong—almost intimidating— look to him, but his warm green eyes balanced out that powerful square jaw and prominent, stern brow.

“Hi, Zane. I’m Nick, nice to finally meet you.”

They had talked a bit through email, where Nick had given him some slim details on what was going on.

“I’m looking forward to helping you get to the bottom of things,” Zane said, taking Nick’s hand in both of his. His grip was firm, his hands strong, his eyes were honest. Nick was getting a military vibe from him. From the way he stood, shoulders stiff and back straight, to the way he spoke.

“Let’s get things started so we don’t waste any time,” Zane said, letting go of Nick’s hand and motioning to the comfortable-looking white chair set in front of his desk. Nick pulled the chair out and sat, the soft cushions shaping to his body. He brought a small folder with him holding some documents he thought could be important. There weren’t many things to collect, but he wanted to be prepared for anything. Mostly, though, it was filled with notes about his relationship with Anna and what he thought could be happening. He set the black folder down on the desk and looked to Zane, who was pulling out a much-larger binder from a bookshelf.

“Ok, so, this is the preliminary information I was able to pull up.” Zane put the binder on the desk and pushed it over to Nick, who grabbed it, in awe of the weight.

“Preliminary? You mean there’s more?”

That got a laugh out of Zane. Nick could already tell those laughs weren’t given out freely, so he gladly took it.

“Oh, yeah,” Zane said, turning to his computer. He moved the mouse around to wake the screen up. “That’s just things we could pull off her public social accounts, along with a couple other things that have deeper sources.”

“Deeper sources?” Nick opened the binder, looking down at a cover page with his case number printed across the front. Case Number Seventy-Seven. He considered seven to be his lucky number.

“Don’t worry, everything we do is clean.” Zane said that in a way that made Nick wonder if he purposefully didn’t use the word “legal”. “We have connections with local law enforcement wherever we’re working. Our main headquarters are based out in New York. This is our second biggest location.”

“Do you normally work out here on the west coast?”

“I actually live in New York, but I read your email and knew I had to fly out and take your case.”

“Wow, thank you.” Nick felt good about that. Not only about the fact that he had the owner of the entire detective agency working on his case, but also that Zane cared enough to put everything on pause back in New York so he could travel across the country and help Nick secure Emma’s future.

“Of course,” Zane said. He wasn’t a man of frequent laughs, nor of frequent smiles, but he cracked one for Nick. “So inside that binder, I’m pretty sure you’ll see all things that you already know about Anna. And obviously, we can’t bring her in for questioning since we don’t have the full power of the law behind us like detectives on the police force do, but I can ask you some questions and use those just the same.”

“I’ll try to answer the best I can.”

“Alright, so about Anna, from everything I found, she seems pretty clean. She works as a receptionist at a local gym and is working toward her associates degree in public relations. She was married once to you and hasn’t had any obvious relationships since then. That all sound right?”

“Yeah,” Nick said, looking up from a photo of a smiling Anna holding Emma in her arms. Nick recognized it as her profile picture.

“Ok, but there were some gaps that I need you to fill in. Her associates degree. Was she pursuing it when she was with you?”

“No, she was never interested in going back to school. She was happy living off having a doctor as a husband. I didn’t even know she was going back to school.”

“That’s the first red flag.” Zane typed something into his computer. “I found this conversation,” Zane tilted the computer so that Nick could read the screen, “where she tells one of her CPS case workers that she’s been studying for three years now and sent them a schedule, clearly to show that she’s responsible. I looked closer at the schedule and realized there was a subtle difference between the font of Anna’s name and the rest of the schedule. I went to the college’s website and contacted the administrator, asking them to send me whatever font they had coded into the webpage. Sure enough, it was different.”

“Holy shit,” Nick said, “Shepard was right. You are good.”

Zane smiled again. Each smile felt like a badge of honor that Nick could wear proudly on his chest. “The last piece of that puzzle was asking you, who would have known her at the time she said she enrolled. So we’ve definitely got something going on.”

“Is that enough? Falsifying documents?”

“Unfortunately, no. The judge is going to be hyper focused on Emma and what would directly affect her, not a bad Photoshop job. Not just one, at least. I could see a lawyer swinging that so it would seem like she was a mother doing anything she could to protect her daughter.

“Wait a second,” Nick hadn’t even realized that he was looking at one of Anna’s private emails on the screen. “Where did you get this? How do we know it’s real?”

Zane looked to Nick, his green eyes as bright as the sunlight that was streaming in from the huge window. “Trust me, it’s real. And as for our source, unfortunately there are some things I need to keep quiet about. But again, I have full confidence that this is real and a sign of something going on.”

Nick had no choice but to trust Zane. In the short amount of time he had been in Zane’s office, he was already closer to figuring out what was going on with Anna than he ever would have been if he was going at it by himself. This guy knew what he was doing, and there was still more to dig up.

“How do you know my cousin?” Zane asked, turning the computer back toward his own eyes only.

“Shepard?” Nick stumbled on the name. He felt silly getting nervous, but he couldn’t help it. His heart started to flutter and his hands got a bit cooler than normal. They hadn’t really labeled themselves yet, which made questions like these extra awkward. Did he say boyfriend or did that sound too clingy? He definitely felt like one. Or maybe he was overthinking the entire thing. “He’s uh, well, we’re together.”

Zane smiled again. This one was the biggest of them all. “I’m joking, I already knew.” He looked past his computer screen to Nick. “What kind of detective would I be if I didn’t know you were dating someone in my own family?”

* * *

The rest of the meeting with Zane was extremely productive and had Nick feeling much better. He was getting closer to an answer. He left the office and all he could think about was holding his baby girl. Unfortunately, it wasn’t his day so he wasn’t legally allowed to. He walked to his car, wondering if maybe he could get Anna to agree to a couple of hours with Emma. It was still early afternoon so it wasn’t like he was taking her anywhere when it was getting dark out.

As if that should matter. I’m her fucking father.

The thought punched him in the gut. He suddenly wished Shepard was waiting in the passenger seat as he got into his car. He knew he’d be able to get some support from Shepard, who had even offered to come with him to Stonewall Investigations. A last-minute change in shifts had Shepard working the morning in the hospital, though, so Nick had gone alone.

Before even pulling out of his parking spot, Nick grabbed his phone from the pocket of his jeans and called Anna. It rang and rang and rang until the voicemail came on. Nick assumed she was probably changing Emma’s diapers or maybe feeding her. It was around that time of the day when Emma would have been crying for a bottle as though the world would end if she didn’t get one immediately. He gave her a couple more minutes, still sitting in his car. He scrolled through Twitter to try and take his mind off it, but it was no use. He called Anna again and got the same result.

One more time.

Ring until the voicemail.

Nick sighed. This was rare, but it happened before. Once, Anna said she had lost her phone and found it a day later. The second time she said she had broken her phone and didn’t fix it for a week, only contacting Nick through Chris’s phone twice. The third time she didn’t even bother giving an excuse. Nick was documenting every missed call, but he wasn’t sure if they would even make a difference. He knew it stressed him out to no end, but would a judge care?

He called one more time. It rang five times before it was finally answered. “Hello?”

“Chris?” Nick clearly sounded confused. He looked at the screen, double-checking to make sure he had dialed Anna’s number.

“Yeah, it’s me.” He could hear a children’s television show in the background. If he listened real close, he could hear Emma talking in her baby-gibberish to it.

“What’s going on? Why isn’t Anna answering? Where is she?”

“Oh, she’s ok,” Chris said. Then he turned his attention to Emma and started baby-talking to her, as if the conversation with Nick was over.

“Where is she?” Nick asked again, more pointedly this time.

“She has a migraine. She’s locked up in her room trying to sleep it off. Happy?” Chris sounded annoyed. He went back to baby-talking to Emma.

Nick exhaled. “I want to see Emma. Just for an hour.” He felt himself lay it all on the line with his statement. He felt like a tightrope walker, tiptoeing across a rope that was swaying dangerously in the wind.

“No,” Chris said, pushing Nick off the tightrope and sending him falling down a hundred stories. “Sorry, Nick. It’s not your weekend. It’ll confuse her. I’m taking great care of her. Isn’t that right, Emma? Isn’t it right? Huh? Yes, it is, Emma.”

Nick was white-knuckling his steering wheel. His grip was so tight he was scared he would snap the wheel. “My own daughter won’t be confused by seeing me. Chris, let me come by. I’m only asking for an hour. That’s it.” Nick wanted more. He wanted so much more than just an hour, but he knew he was bargaining and Chris had the most bargaining chips.

“I’m sorry, Nick.”

“No, you’re not, Chris. Don’t give me that crap.”

“I really am. I wish you hadn’t cheated on my sist—“

“For fucks sake, I didn’t cheat on her. She cheated on me! With one of my closest friends. I get it, she’s your sister, you’re going to want to take her side, but open up your eyes, Chris. Your sister has issues and I think something else is going on. She needs help, Chris, not a blind hype-girl that’s going to cheer on whatever lies she keeps spouting out.” The outburst came from deep inside Nick. He was so sick and tired of Anna smearing his name with lies, just so that she could come out as the victim in the entire situation when the whole time she was the one wearing the clown paint and holding a fucking red balloon in her hand. She was the monster, not Nick, and she was the main reason why he couldn’t hold his daughter.