“I think he also knows you’ve got them ‘cause he helped you put them up, babe,” Jacinda said under her breath.
Fair point, but still.
“You can even use the chicken footage as proof in court if the alleged crime happened during it.” Then something hit me. “Wait, shit, she’s painted like a female Terminator, so it’d be hard to tell it’s her.”
“We’ve got videos and photos to prove it’s her under the paint, girl,” Jacinda reminded me softly.
“Yes!” I cried, holding my arms in the air. “We took videos and photos while we did the makeup. And if they don’t believe it, we’ll just paint her in front of them so they can make a comparison in front of the jury. Game, set, and match, baby, yeah!” I cried, dancing in a circle.
“Please tell me your bodycams are all on,” my brother said to the other officers. “I didn’t turn mine on when I came in because I’m on a break.”
“Mine’s on,” shouted Mark from the back of the group. “I had to adjust it earlier and noticed it was recording, so it caught all of that.”
Nodding, Roque smiled gratefully at him. “Send it to me, will you? Oh, and send it to Alex. He and Cody are going through the Blink clips to see what else they can post.”
All three of us turned to my brother and asked at the same time, “They are?”
His nod made me panic. Not a little, but a whole fucking lot.
See, I know what we’d done since the cameras had been installed. I’d been part of it. We’d had multiple girls' nights, and we’d tried to do fancy stunts on the trampoline. Chickens had attacked me, I’d pierced my vagina on a fence, I’d likely had killer wedgies while I was swimming, and…
“Oh, shit,” Jacinda mumbled.
“What?”
“When we did the trials on those bikinis from that website. Remember how we decided not to post them because we didn’t want even to try and cover up the vital bits with emojis because of all of the other issues we had?”
My heart sank past my ass and go into my big toe. “If that goes online, I’ll die. Legit, I will die.”
“You’re not the only one. And what about when we tried that spicy chip challenge?”
Covering my face with my hands, I only just kept the scream in.
And then I got a text message that made me panic for a whole new reason. No, it didn’t make me panic, it made me feel sick down to my soul.
Cody’s dad had texted him to say he wanted him to come and spend some of his school break at his house. My son was now excited about spending time with his dad and had sent me a long message about all of the things he’d been promised they were going to do together.
I could only hope and pray that Neil stuck to his word.
I don’t know if it was because of the stress from two days ago or if there was a storm coming, but by the time I got home, I had a killer migraine about to hit. I didn’t get a lot of them, but I got enough to know the signs.
Walking through the front door and about to slur to Cody that I needed to lie down, I stopped when I saw Tom Townsend sitting in my living room, talking to him and Alex. As my migraines had been known to make things feel surreal, my immediate thought was that I was hallucinating. However, when I realized all three men were staring back at me, it occurred to me it wasn’t a good hallucination. Some were, some weren’t.
“Are you okay?” Alex asked, getting up and walking toward me.
With the concern on his face and the fact he was frowning so hard he had a butt between his eyebrows, this was an excellent hallucination.
Who didn’t want to hallucinate that a hot guy was worried about their wellbeing? Especially when she was single and hadn’t had sex in nine years?
“I think it’s a migraine,” my son said. “She gets those sometimes, and they’re pretty bad.”
“Either that or it’s the zombie apocalypse,” Tom suggested. “Sonya’s adamant it’s coming because she binge-watched some television series, but I’m remaining cautiously optimistic her theory’s wrong.”
I could hear Cody asking him why he was only cautiously optimistic, but it was starting to sink in that I wasn’t hallucinating this time.
“Do you have anything to take for your migraines, baby,” he asked gently, reaching up and breezing his thumb over my temple.
“In my purse,” I mumbled, then added, “and the bathroom, kitchen, the drawer on the unit next to me, the one on the end table next to Cody—”
He’d been gently massaging my temple, but as I listed all of the places I had the medication for them, he angled his hand so his thumb could fit over my lips. That’s how big his hand was, and I wasn’t sure if it was a migraine-induced shudder that shook me or a ‘this hand has potential’ quiver.