Shielded In The Shadows

“I take it, since you aren’t answering my question, that I’m right. The Suzie Heber thing is personal...”

He’d admitted to her that giving Bill a second chance was personal to him. That second chances were personal. He’d given her as much knowledge as he’d thought she needed.

If she was going to do that job, partnering with him as she’d chosen to do, she had to acknowledge her own weakness, didn’t she?

She stared at him, seeing the counselor more than the officer. Maybe because he wasn’t wearing his gun.

Maybe her shadow side was choosing this most inopportune moment to surface. Maybe she didn’t need to tell him any more about herself.

She sipped her tea. What would it hurt?

“I got pregnant my senior year in high school.” The words flew out while she was still debating whether or not her desire to tell him something that no one in her professional life knew of was valid, or the result of her shadow side rearing her head.

His head tilted to the side a little, his gaze a new kind of warm as he looked at her. But he didn’t push. Or probe.

“The father...he didn’t seem all that fazed by it. Said I could do what I wanted with the pregnancy. That things would work out either way. He also didn’t offer any real support. But he didn’t dump me. My parents were devastated, of course. And me...my whole world changed...every breath I took felt different. My future looked different. And yet... I wanted that baby. Hard to believe you could love something that you wouldn’t even know was there if not for a test you’d taken...”

Here was the time when she shut up. Walked away.

She couldn’t even look away.

“Did your parents pressure you to abort? You can’t blame yourself if you did as they asked...”

She almost went with that story. It fit closely enough for her current purposes in telling him anything at all. Though, what exactly that purpose was, she wasn’t altogether sure.

“They talked over all of the options with me and then asked me what I thought I should do.” She remembered, smiling a little through the profound sadness. She’d thought she was over the critical intensity of that feeling. Hadn’t experienced it quite this badly in years.

Ms. Shadow and her drama.

“I wanted to keep the baby,” she said, looking Jayden straight in the eye. She was doing this—telling him—and she was going to do it right. “I’d created a life, and it wasn’t about me anymore. It was about that baby.”

Until the night...

“How did they react to that?” His words came softly into the soft light of the moon as he reached up and turned off the light in his pagoda. She hadn’t even noticed darkness had fallen.

“They were worried, of course, but also excited about the baby coming. At least, my mom was. She was making plans, volunteering that she’d babysit so that I could still go to college, that she’d turn the spare room in our home into a nursery, but wanting me to make all of the decorative choices because it was my baby...”

Tears pushed up from inside her, far more dangerously close than they ever got these days. Her mom had been so great. And Emma had taken it all for granted. A kid who’d been so hooked to the wild man who’d impregnated her that when he’d begged her to get on the back of his motorcycle and ride the drag race with him, she’d hopped on.

“A group of guys had been racing bikes for about six months. Spectators would all chip in money. Each time there was some new challenge that they’d get right before the race began. That night the requirement was to have three people on your bike. And the prize money was a thousand dollars. The baby counted as his third person...”

Jayden’s brow furrowed, but otherwise his expression didn’t change.

Finding her throat inordinately dry, Emma took a gulp of tea.

“The stretch of road was fairly simple and everyone knew Keith was the best biker around. He’d never had a wreck...”

But he had that night. He’d slid out at the turn, had to lay down his bike...

“I was thrown from the bike,” she said, swallowing. Taking another sip from her glass.

Whatever the hell was happening, she was in way over her head.

“You lost the baby,” Jayden said when she was pretty sure she’d finished talking about it.

She nodded. And now he knew. She’d basically killed her own child. Not really. Not in any legal or maybe even moral sense. But under her own accountability test...

There was no way she could fail to save Suzie a second time.