Chapter Five

 

Anna watches Detective Meadows punch the number into his phone, and turns away when he hits the "call" button. It's too tempting to listen in. Too tempting by a lot. What if she heard Mitch's voice?

She knows better than to eavesdrop. So, instead, she steps outside. She can still hear the detective's low, rolling voice even in the front room. She undoes the deadbolt and steps into the hall, and finally she's away from it.

She tries to count her breaths again. In, one. Out, two. In, three. No other thoughts. Keep her mind clear. Just keep counting. It's easier to get to fifty than it was when she started. It's just a skill, like anything. Like smiling, like keeping her composure in public.

None of those skills work any more. Not without Mitch there to keep her acting in a correct way. But the breathing, the clear mind, that still works. She steps back inside the apartment.

Detective Meadows smiles when he sees her, almost as if he's happy to see her. Not that he has a reason to be, but it still makes her heart skip a beat for a second—to be looked at like that, by a guy like that.

"I'm going to meet Mr. Queen, in a few minutes."

"Okay." Anna doesn't know what she's going to do after he's gone. When she's alone in that apartment again. It was the worst the weeks before the baby was born. When everyone was trying to get in touch with her, but only so know whether or not it was time yet.

Once she had Ava, it was that much better. To have something to focus on. Something to do. She wasn't the best mother in the world. She made mistakes. But it felt like something that she wanted to work at. Without Ava there—

The panic threatened to rise. Ava held her breath and counted.

"Thank you, Detective."

He steps close. "This isn't going to be a formal questioning."

She can smell that cologne again, now that she knows what to smell for. Now that she's in her own space, where every smell is accounted for. It's a heady scent, and his deep blue eyes, rimmed with those heavy eyelashes, they're looking right at her.

"But you'll find Ava?"

"I want you to come with me, if you don't mind."

"What? But, shouldn't you—"

"I want to see how he reacts to you. You don't have to say anything."

"I don't know if that's…"

He doesn't cut her off, so she stops herself. What use is she going to be? None at all, probably. She's nobody special. She's just going to be in the way, and she's going to piss Mitch off. He doesn't want to see her.

"You won't have to say a thing. I'll be right there, the whole time."

"Are you sure it's okay?"

She doesn't know whether or not to believe him when he says that he's sure, but she chooses to believe it in either case.

"Come on. We'll go together."

Anna watches his hand gesture her out the door. She grabs her purse and makes sure to lock the door on the way out. What if something were to happen?

The thought doesn't occur to her until a moment later, that there's nothing that could happen now. The most important thing in that apartment was Ava, and now she's gone.

Anna does breathing exercises as she walks behind. In, one two three, out, two three four. In, two three four, out two three four. In, three three four… out, two three four.

The detective clicks a button on his key-fob and the car loudly clicks unlocked. He slips inside, but it feels wrong for Anna to get in. She hasn't been in the passenger seat since she started showing. Since everything in her life started to go sideways.

She forces herself to ignore the nerves that are building up, threatening to overtake her. There's nothing that she's going to do about any of that right now. She's got to stay under control, or she's going to go crazy.

If she's not crazy already.

She slides in next to the detective. The leather seats are soft and comfortable, and the seatbelt goes across her body easily. It doesn't catch, like the passenger seatbelt in the Impala.

Anna settles back in her seat. Her head's got to be back, so it's out of the detective's way. Mitch taught her better than to let her head sit forward in the car, and she wasn't going to forget one of his lessons just because he wasn't in her life any more.

Detective Meadows pulls the car out and starts driving. "What can you tell me about Mr. Queen?"

"Um, what do you want to know?"

"Just anything. Tell me about him."

Her throat tightens up, even as she feels a shine of happiness that she's got something she can do to help.

"He's, um. He's real smart, and real particular. He likes things just right. I used to be pretty good at that."

The detective nods, his eyes not coming off the road.

"Had a temper?"

"Not more than anyone else."

"What does he do for work?"

"I'm sorry?"

"It's not really something that they get around to in the tabloids."

He was always in the tabloids, Mitchell. They always misunderstood things. Saw him with girls, they said he was dating them. But he wasn't. It was always just a misunderstanding. A foolish misunderstanding.

They'd have known that, if they'd just talked to Mitchell. But they never did, so they were always printing mistakes like that.

"Well, um. He does a bit of this and that. He builds things, with his hands, you know? Furniture. He does a lot of that. You should see it, it's really good work. He did this entire set of chairs for the house—"

Anna cut herself off when she realized she was babbling. Nobody wants to talk about that sort of stuff. Just her. So there's no reason to talk about it.

"But that's more of a hobby, you'd say?"

"I guess so," Anna says. It was real impressive stuff, for a hobby. It blew her mind when she saw it. Mitch was never pleased, though. Never happy with the work he'd done.

Just like he was never satisfied with her. He was never satisfied with himself, either. So it wasn't a problem with her, per se.

Just a matter of Mitchell's perspective, and she had always tried to do her best to meet the expectations that he set for her, even though he'd never have lost it with her. He was always real nice.

She takes a deep breath.

"Are you sure you can do this, Anna?"

She doesn't tell him that she doesn't want to disappoint him. Mitch always hated it when she did that. Said it made him feel guilty, and Anna never wanted to make Mitch feel guilty.

She doesn't tell him that she wants to see Mitchell, either, because she shouldn't want to see him. He told her not to, and she good at following instructions, even when it's hard. It's one of her best qualities.

The detective's hand moves off the wheel, and touches the back of her hand. Anna likes the way that his skin feels on hers. It's a little calloused.

It reminds her a little bit of Mitchell's, but there are differences, too. She's surprised that it's not the comparison that makes her heart skip a beat.

Anna looks up. She's getting her heart ahead of herself. She needs to not do that. She can't put herself in that position again, for one thing.

But worse than that, she can't afford to make another guy mad at her. She's pushed away too many in the past. Too clingy. Too needy. Too—too everything.

She needs to keep herself under control, this time. Because she needs Detective Mitchell to keep liking her long enough to find Ava.