Second Time's the Charm

* * *

HAVING BEEN UP so late with Lillie Wednesday night, Jon overslept Thursday morning for the first time in the nine years since he’d left prison.

Whether he forgot to set the alarm, or just didn’t hear it go off, he didn’t know. He was driving Lillie to the hospital to have his baby, and heard sirens coming up behind him. They got louder and louder but he couldn’t see them in his rearview mirror. Couldn’t find them at all.

Until finally they woke him up.

The baby monitor was wailing at him—the siren ringtone he’d chosen to indicate movement in Abe’s room. A tone that escalated in volume the longer it played.

Throwing off the covers, his gaze jerked first to the tablet monitor on his nightstand, studying the scene intently, looking for signs of Abe. Or an intruder.

That was when he realized it was already well into the morning. The sun was shining through the closed blind in Abe’s room. And through the drapes in his room, as well.

And he realized something else. Abe’s crib was empty.

“Abe!” Running to the room next door to his, he looked around and found nothing.

No sign of the boy. No mess.

“Abraham!” Heart pounding, he ran down the hall. “Abraham!”

Nothing. No sound. No little boy. Rounding the corner of the living room, Jon stopped cold. There, sitting in the middle of the floor, his pudgy fingers carefully lining up rows of cars, was Abraham. Playing just like he would have been if Jon had gotten him out of bed and set him down while he made their breakfast.

Abe was having a regular morning.

With the exception of two things.

He’d climbed out of his crib on his own?something Jon had known was coming but hadn’t yet seen.

And...

“Abe?” He moved close behind the toddler and raised his voice up another octave.

With a jerk, the little boy turned around.

The monitor, his own calls from down the hall—Abraham hadn’t heard them. Or him.

* * *

“WALK WITH ME?” His hands in his pockets, Kirk waited for Lillie’s nod, for her to fall into step beside him as he started across the crisply manicured cemetery lawn.

His suit jacket was unbuttoned, his red-and-black tie askew, and he didn’t seem to notice that the wet ground was marring the tips of his shiny black shoes. He stepped carefully, slowly, making it easy for her to keep up with him unassisted in her high heels.

“I have no excuses, Lil,” he said to her. “Over the past couple of years I realized something was drastically wrong with me.”

She listened. She couldn’t feel. She’d done too much of that. “Actually, I knew before that, but I couldn’t believe it. For a long time it was always someone else who just didn’t get it. Or something that couldn’t be helped and for which I wasn’t to blame.”

He could have been referring to any number of things. His first affair could have been construed as her fault for not agreeing to be more sexually adventurous with him when he’d asked her to. Braydon’s illness had been something that couldn’t be helped, and maybe he thought his feelings for Leah fell under that category, too. She didn’t know and didn’t ask.

“I can’t tell you that there was a specific moment, or any one thing that happened, that changed the way I saw things. There were no ‘aha’ moments or a particular time when the light came on.”

They crossed a gravel drive to a paved path that wound around the base of the mountain. A couple of hikers passed them, heading toward the dirt path that led up the mountain. The desert’s fall colors were in full bloom: prickly pear cacti with their brightly colored fruit ready to be picked. Saguaro and ocotillo looming along the path and in the distance.

“It’s like the knowledge was always there and just took a long time to surface,” Kirk was saying.

He needed this. For Braydon’s and Ely’s sakes, she’d give it to him.

“Leah thought I was losing it. The day I told her I couldn’t marry her, that I was moving out, she thought I needed to see a psychiatrist.”