Cowboy Baby Daddy

I’d worked my way through half of them by the time my alarm went off, and when I went to shut it off, I remembered that I hadn’t checked my phone. I pulled it off the charger and looked at the screen. There was an Amber Alert with Nina’s name on it and three calls from Blake, but only one message. I listened to it, and before it was half over, I was dialing Blake’s number.

“Hello?” Blake answered groggily.

“Blake, it’s Emily,” I said breathlessly. “What the hell’s going on? Did you find Nina?”

“Oh, Em, hey,” he said, as he tried to get his bearings. “No, I drove around for a couple of hours, but I couldn’t find her anywhere.”

“I’m assuming the police issued the Amber Alert,” I said.

“Yeah, they said it’s unlikely she’s been kidnapped, but the alert would mean that people would be actively looking for her,” he said.

“I’m so sorry I didn’t answer my phone,” I said. “I should have left it on.”

“How were you supposed to know that Nina would run away?” he sighed.

“Do you really think she ran away?” I asked.

“You saw how pissed she was at me last night before we left,” he replied. “She can be a hothead when she’s mad.”

“Indeed,” I mused, as I tried to think of all the places where high school kids hung out. “Did you try the back of the Mall?”

“Yep, and the arcade, that dump of a convenience store over on Lincoln, and the high school parking lot,” he said wearily. “No luck.”

“What about her phone? Did you try to find it?” I asked.

“The cops did a search of her number and tried to use the Find My Phone feature, but apparently she turned it off,” he said.

“You want me to come over?” I asked.

“Nah, you’ve got school, and I’ve got to get to the station,” he said.

“Blake, your daughter is missing,” I said softly. “I’m sure they’d give you a day off, if you asked.”

“So I can do what? Sit around the house and be pissed at myself for going out last night and pissed at her for being so goddamn irresponsible?” he shouted into the phone. “No thanks!”

“You don’t have to yell at me,” I said quietly. “I’m just trying to help.”

“Yeah, I know,” he sighed. “I’m sorry.”

I waited for him to speak again, but as the silence lengthened, I began to wonder if he’d hung up.

“Blake?”

“I can’t believe I’m such an idiot,” he said. I could hear the emotion in his voice. “I should have stayed home with her and talked it out.”

“You had no way of knowing she would leave the house,” I reminded him.

“But I knew she was upset!” he yelled. “What the hell kind of parent am I that I leave my child alone when she’s upset?”

“The same kind of parent as everyone else,” I said. “She’s a teenager. They’re moody little beasts sometimes. You can’t stop living your life simply because they get upset. You had no way of knowing she was going to do this.”

“Her mother is going to remind me that I should have known,” he grumbled. “She’s going to have my ass when she gets back.”

“

Deal with it when it happens,” I said. “For now, we need to focus on finding Nina.”

“What if we don’t?” he said quietly. “What if something terrible happened to her and I wasn’t there to protect her?”