Scarred Regrets (Bellandi Crime Syndicate 5)

6

IRINA

Thirteen months ago

My heels clicked along the floor as I strolled through Fresh Start. In the early hours of the morning, there wasn’t the same hustle and bustle that came later in the day. The kids were getting ready for school with their foster families at their individual homes, leaving the center, which would later be filled with the sound of children playing and the chatter of staff happily entertaining them, oddly quiet.

The silent mornings were much more conducive to finishing the paperwork I needed to file with the state almost daily, unable to keep up with the children who needed placement and sponsorship to find the best possible homes.

I wasn’t a social worker—far from it. That had benefits as well as limitations, but my connections within the state-run agencies allowed me to operate with some creative license while still falling within mandates and guidelines.

Our success rate in finding permanent matches was much higher than the public system, which was so inundated with cases that they couldn’t keep up and couldn’t offer individual attention to each child in the way they wanted.

Kids slipped through the cracks. My job was to catch them when they fell.

I turned the knob on the door to my office, shoving it in and stepping into the bright, white space with clean lines that appealed to my need for order. Chaos in my surroundings made my brain feel more cluttered, more tumultuous.

It made episodes more likely, and I’d spent my entire teen and adult life working to minimize them.

There was no clutter, my desktop streamlined to nothing but a laptop and a planner on it. The chair behind my desk was a pale blush with gold legs, adding a single feminine touch to an otherwise sterile room.

I walked around the light wood desk and the two chairs for visitors, taking my seat and tapping the touchscreen on the laptop I’d left there overnight.

Having stayed to work until midnight the night before, it hardly seemed worth it to lug it back home when all I intended to do was sleep and shower before returning the next day. Some days, I considered converting one of the rooms off the side of my office to a bedroom and moving in.

Paying rent on an apartment I only slept in was a waste of money that could go to a much better cause.

My fingers danced across the keyboard as I finished typing up my notes from the therapist’s visit the day before. Not all our kids would speak to her, but the ones who did often asked me or their foster families to sit in.

Distrust ran rampant after being abused or used or just failed by a flawed system that couldn’t help them all. When they found someone who had their best interest at heart, they clung to them tightly.

We would always hold their hands as long as they needed it, pushing them to foster their own independence in their own time when they were ready.

As soon as that was complete, I toggled over to my email in another tab. Opening it up, I sighed in disappointment when I found nothing from the private investigator I’d hired years ago. After all this time, I still checked every single day.

After all this time, there was no sign of my mother after she’d mysteriously disappeared from Chicago without a trace. She hadn’t immediately left the city when she left me; there were signs of her lingering in the area for years until she vanished out of the blue. She hadn’t gone home to the Regas family in Philadelphia as expected.

She was just gone.

“Irina?” my assistant, Megan, asked, stepping into the open doorway. Unless I was in the middle of a confidential conversation, my door always remained open. I liked the sounds of the kids running around—the sounds of the childhoods they’d almost missed out on serving as the perfect reminder of why I worked twelve-hour days at minimum.

“What do you need?” I asked, smiling at her as she stepped into the room with a heavy sigh.

“Skylar is here. Her sitter was a no show this morning, and she has a math test today. She doesn’t think her teacher will let her make it up again. I’d take the baby from her, but I have to go to that meeting at the school in twenty minutes,” she explained.

“Send her in. I’ll take him for a few hours,” I said, finishing typing my sentence without glancing down at my laptop. Megan smiled, darting off to go grab Skylar from the lobby.

They returned a few moments later as I was finishing with my notes, the high school senior’s face drawn and exhausted. “You don’t look like you slept a wink, sweetheart,” I said, standing and accepting baby Hayden from her arms. Immediately swaying side to side, I glanced down at the ten-month-old in my arms with a smile. “Was that your fault, little man?”

“I was up all night studying,” Skylar answered. “Thank you so much for watching him today, Miss Ryan. I don’t know what I would have done.”

“You just go ace that test. We’ll be just fine here, won’t we?” I asked Hayden, pulling the strap for the diaper bag off Skylar’s shoulder and putting it on mine. It settled on top of the tan fabric of my color-blocked blazer, the bright shock of purple jarring against my neutrals.

“Mommy loves you, Sweetie. Be a good boy, okay?” she asked, leaning forward to kiss Hayden on the forehead before she darted off to make it to her math test. Hayden cooed after her, babbling away as she retreated down the hallway and didn’t turn back for him.

“Should we see what your Mommy packed for you?” I asked him, bouncing my way over to the light gray shag rug underneath my desk. I pulled a blanket from the bag and placed it on the rug, gently setting Hayden down on top of it as I dropped the bag at his side and rummaged through it.

I pulled his stuffed owl out of the bag, handing it to him with a giggle as he accepted it and immediately put his mouth around the beak. His rattle followed, along with his set of silicone keys that he immediately swapped for the owl.

Satisfied that he was entertained for a few minutes, I rose to my feet and sat in my chair beside him. Diving back into work, I watched him while he babbled and showed me his toys playfully for a few minutes before the younger kids arrived for the day.

Most of them went to daycare, sponsored by program funding that Fresh Start provided, but occasionally some of them required more attention than a daycare was capable of providing under the circumstances.

Or they just needed to be somewhere they felt safe after a few years in a life that had broken their trust.

One of the kids peeked in, his teen face looking entirely too mischievous. There was a reason for it, considering that he should be on his way to school. “Shouldn’t you be waiting for the bus?” I asked, raising a brow at him as Hayden started to whine at my feet.