His First Choice

Not that there was a damned thing wrong with that if he had. It just wasn’t her job to assume, one way or another.

With the heat of shame working on her from the inside out, Lacey admonished herself for stereotyping.

It was so not like her. She’d discovered several gems cloaked in mud during her years with social services, people with integrity who’d been dealt blows and were struggling so hard to keep air in their lungs they couldn’t worry about the mud on their skin.

A phone rang and Tressa pulled out the phone that had been sticking out of the back pocket of her skinny jeans. “It’s Amelia,” she said, letting it ring. “We’re hooking up for dinner. I’m supposed to be at her place. If this is going to take a while, I need to let her know I can’t make it.”

Lacey had no real reason to stay. Levi wasn’t in residence, and his mother had already denied hurting him or knowing anything about anyone else hurting him.

“Do you mind if I see Levi’s room before I go?” she asked.

“Of course not.” After sending off a quick text, Tressa stood. “It’s this way,” she said, heading back toward the living room before veering off down a hallway with fresh-looking camel-colored paint. “I made it like a racetrack,” she said. “He loves it.”

She stepped into an opened door halfway down the hall, and Lacey stopped. “Wow,” she said, smiling again. The floor was a series of carpets painted with roadways. The walls matched, so there was no break in the road. There were stop signs, speed limit signs, stoplights. There was a park, and a store with parking lot spaces out front.

“He can run his cars to the store, the park...” Even a firehouse.

“Yeah. He loves it,” she said again. “It was Amelia’s idea. I’m the artist, though. I offered to do one for Jem so that Levi would have this at home, too, but he said it was good to keep it special for here so that Levi associated it with me.”

She was dealing with a model couple for healthy divorced parenting. Levi had aware, concerned, loving parents who clearly doted on him.

The only problem was, no one could explain bruises on the little boy’s body. No one was even admitting to seeing them.

Except a day care worker.

Who could have been wrong.

CHAPTER NINE

ON A WEDNESDAY morning in mid-May Jem received a call from social services, from Lacey Hamilton, telling him that while Levi’s file would remain open for a required period, she had written a report clearing Jem of any suspicion. If there was any other report of concern, or hospital activity, that could change, she warned. But she’d found no evidence that Levi was being abused and saw no reason to continue an active investigation.

She did suggest that he and his ex-wife consider going back to counseling to maybe give Tressa ways to manage her emotions so that she could be around her son more often.

And she gave no indication who’d called her to make the mistaken report in the first place. It had to have been the hospital. A protocol thing due to the number of visits.

Before she’d hung up, Lacey had told him it had been a pleasure getting to know him and his family.

He wished he could say the same about her.

Yet...over the next couple of weeks, he thought of her more than he might have expected, considering how relieved he was to have her out of his life.

As he grilled hot dogs for his son, he wondered what Lacey did when she was off work. Was she close to her twin? Did she have a big family—one that was all together and perfect and never at risk of having someone over your shoulder, trying to implode everything you’d worked so hard to build?

Not that he made a habit of feeling sorry for himself.

Of course, it didn’t help that Tressa was in needy mode with an out-of-control job situation.

Or that his parents, who were solidly settled in Georgia, where Jem had grown up, had told him his older sister was going to be in LA sometime that summer and they thought it would be nice if he offered her a place to stay. It didn’t matter to them that Santa Raquel was an hour north of the city.

Or that Jem and his only sibling had never been close.

Family was everything to them. As evidenced by the fact that both his maternal and paternal grandparents lived within five miles of his mom and dad. They all went to the same church, the one Jem had been raised in.

He supposed family was everything to him, too, in spite of the fact that he hadn’t been able to wait to get out of Georgia and, as soon as he’d graduated high school, had packed up for the college as far from his hometown as he could get and still be in warm weather.

He called his sister and invited her to stay with him, and prayed that Lacey Hamilton didn’t get another bug in her ear while JoAnne was in town. His sister made him nervous.

Family being everything to him was the only explanation he had to give himself for agreeing to spend four hours out on the golf course one Friday toward the end of May.