I wasn’t sure if he meant the war between us or the kiss. I’d find out later that it was a scenario I hadn’t thought of – he meant both.Chapter FourRaoulThere’s a legal process with every arrest that we have to go through, and some are straightforward, but others not so much. The mother we’d arrested today had undergone a psych eval, and was now being taken to a secure facility, while CPS and the boy’s father dealt with his recovery and safety. I know Rose felt for her - mental health was a minefield to navigate - but I knew that she felt most sorry for the child, and the fact that it had been his mom who’d put him through what he’d been through.
That was where I was on my way home from right now. The dad had arrived in Piersville and had immediately wanted to meet the people involved with helping his son. When DB had called to tell me to meet him at the hospital, he’d had suggested we didn’t involve Rose tonight - knowing that she was upset about the case - and I’d been fully onboard with that.
I’d also wanted to meet the boy’s dad to make sure that he was capable of looking after him given what his mom had been like. All it had taken was seeing him standing beside the hospital bed with tears running down his face for me to know he was. His despair at what the boy was going through along with his relief at finding him, was clear for everyone to see. What cemented it, though, was when he turned around and hugged us all, including Doctor Simpson, and thanked us for saving his son and helping him find him.
After an hour with the man and two women from CPS, I walked away with a riot going on in my head and heart. During the divorce, he’d been awarded custody of his son after it had been deemed that the mother needed further psychiatric help. He’d gone to collect him right after the ruling and had been searching for him since, along with CPS.
Now the poor kid faced extensive therapy, and would always live with the fact that his mom had repeatedly made him sick to feed something inside her. As someone with two loving parents and shitheads for siblings, that was hard to stomach. Don’t get me wrong, I’d come across things like this before with work and it was never easy to accept, but to deliberately make your child sick, when there were so many parents who’d give anything to take an illness away from their kid?
Right now I reckoned that I felt what Rose had been trying to describe to me earlier. It was a darker side of life that you rarely touched on, but when you did, it would always be there in your mind for the rest of your life.
“Yo,” DB called from behind me before I could get into the cruiser I’d driven here. Stopping with my hand on the door, I turned and watched as he jogged toward me, stopping when he was a couple of feet away from me. “How’s Rose?”
Deliberately keeping my expression blank, I countered his question with one of my own. “What makes you think I know the answer to that question?”
Grinning widely at me, he confused me by walking backward toward where his own cruiser was parked, tapping the side of his nose as he did it. “I’ll take that as she’s fine.”
What the hell?
Shaking my head as I got in, I started the engine and began the short drive home, watching Rose’s house as I parked in my drive. If my phone hadn’t rung earlier, I had no doubt that I’d still be in it with her, but a part of me wondered if that would have been a mistake. Would it have been too fast for her and make her back away from me completely?
In fact, now that I thought about it, a lot of questions were hitting me. In a perfect world where it wasn’t too fast for her, would I have stopped at kissing her if my phone hadn’t started ringing? Would I be in her bed right now? Was her brother going to kill me? Did I care that her brother might kill me? And why was I being such a teenage girl about the whole thing and over analyzing all of it?
And finally, did this mean a ceasefire to the war?5am the next morning…
The irritating blaring of the alarm on my phone woke me up in the middle of one of the best dreams of my life. It wasn’t often that I went into an REM cycle while I was sleeping, and given what I’d been doing to Rose in the dream, this meant I was in an even shittier mood than I normally was in the morning. After I’d hit the screen three times, though, I had to accept that if I had to get up, or I’d be late for work. And seeing as how I was never late for work or took a day off – I had to get my ass up out of bed.