Suddenly the theme of Saturday night fever—“Stayin’ Alive”—breaks the quiet. I’m so wired up on adrenaline it takes me a moment to realize it’s a ringtone.
By then, Julie is reaching into her back pocket. She lifts an ancient cell phone and puts it to her ear.
“Suarez,” she says, frowning at the fence she has just looked over, hazel eyes narrowed. Then her brows lift. “Coolio!”
Coolio? It sounds strange coming from her, but then she turns to me, gives me a thumbs up, and I stop caring about her word choices.
“Cole?” I ask, my voice strangled. “They found him?”
“He’s with his dad. Let’s go.”
She doesn’t have to say it twice.
The most beautiful sighs greets me when we approach the house again.
Matt is kneeling on the sidewalk, both his kids in his arms. I swear, my heart cracks right down the middle. It’s a beautiful pain. This is a side of him he rarely shows, even with his kids. He loves them so much… I wish he’d open up more, show them how it could be.
Show me.
But that’s a stupid thought, one I should shut off as quickly as possible.
Because, my God, no matter how angry I am at him and how sad at his rejection, how hard I’ve fought it, I’m falling for Matt Hansen—and that’s a disaster in the making.
Gigi can’t know. Nor Mom, or Merc.
I kneel beside them, put my arms around them, and I’m shocked when Matt sneaks out an arm and wraps it around me.
Including me in the little circle of his family.
It shouldn’t make me want more, but it does. It shouldn’t give me hope.
But God, it does, and I should stop it right there.
We somehow make it back to the house. The two cops have some more questions for Matt, to which he has no answers, about the threatening messages and the kids and the cop handling the case—and it takes a while before I finally find out where Cole was and what his story is.
He says he heard a kitten outside the kitchen door. He went to check. Didn’t see it, but heard it from the garden. So he went to look for it.
The kitten seemed to be moving away, the mewing growing more distant, and he followed it out of the yard to the sidewalk and then into an empty plot
we searched earlier, twice—and into another house yard.
Cole was very disappointed because he never saw the kitten.
“This is all my fault,” Matt says, rubbing the lines in his forehead. “He’s wanted a kitten so fucking bad, but his grandma is allergic to cats and then I wouldn’t let him have one.”
“Not your fault,” I say. Mary’s eyes are still wide, and I pull her to me, ruffle her hair. “He doesn’t know better yet.”
“I left the doors unlocked.” He sighs, watching Cole who’s playing with a toy robot, unaware he had us all in knots with fear for his life. “It won’t happen again.”
“At least it’s nothing more sinister,” Julie says, her friend cop nodding in agreement. “We’ll leave you to it, then. If any more messages show up on your door, give us a call.”
They leave, leaving us in sudden, awkward silence.
Matt’s T-shirt is rumpled, and his hair sticking out in all directions.
He rubs at his eyes, blinks owlishly at his watch. “Damn, I need to get to work.”
“After this? I’m sure you can take a day off. It’s a family emergency.”