Her Detective's Secret Intent

“You’re so beautiful,” he said, his hands reaching across the table as he leaned in, looking her in the eye.

She looked back. Said nothing. Her face remained flat, not because she willed it, but because she was on hold. Every system in her body. Holding.

With his eyes narrowing, probably imperceptible to everyone else, he met her gaze for another long, uncomfortable minute, and then turned to Tad.

“Thank you, Detective. I owe you a debt of gratitude. A lifetime of it. You’ve brought my daughter back to me.”

Tad took a breath, Miranda felt it, although she wasn’t touching him. She prepared to hear his response, but her father wasn’t giving up control of the floor.

“I’d hoped we could have this conversation in private,” he said, turning his full attention on Chantel.

“Tad and Miranda have chosen to be here,” Chantel answered, pleasantly enough, but without a hint of being willing to give his request consideration.

“Tad, yes, that’s fine. But Dana—Miranda—we might be better served if I could have a moment alone with Detective Fairbanks.”

What game was he playing? Clearly he knew Chantel wasn’t going to give him what he was asking.

So why ask?

“Your daughter has expressed a desire to be here,” Chantel said. “Can you tell me why she shouldn’t be?”

Brian looked at her again, and for a brief moment, she thought she saw regret in his eyes. Her heart pounded and her chest grew tight.

He’d loved her once. In her deepest heart, she knew he still did.

Just as she knew that the ugly parts of him, the pained and bitter pieces inside, ruled his relationship with her.

“I’m sorry, sweetie,” he said. “I didn’t want it to go this way. For your mother’s sake, I’d hoped...”

He’d invoked her mom. It was going to be no-holds-barred. Miranda had no idea what was coming, but she grabbed the sides of her chair with both hands and held on, because she knew it wasn’t going to be good.

* * *

Tad stared at the man he’d revered. In a dark suit and tie, the chief embodied authority with every move he made, every word he spoke. Tad wondered how he, and thousands of others, had so misjudged him?

Could it even be possible?

And yet...he knew Miranda. There was no doubting that her father was the abuser from whom she’d run.

With almost no money, she’d taken her newborn from the small apartment she’d moved into from her dorm shortly before she’d given birth, left behind everything familiar, everyone she knew, everything she held dear, and started a new life for herself and her son. She’d gone to school. Had a well-paying, respectable job she loved. A career, not just a job.

The former he’d found out from what her father had told him in the beginning—that she’d left her apartment in the dark of night. That O’Connor knew for a fact that she’d had little money.

Now he said, “My daughter needs help.” Not at all the words Tad had expected to hear from the chief, who sat with a closed manila folder in front of him. “She’s mentally...unstable. Has been since shortly after her mother died. She refused to go to school. Threw fits if I tried to make her. Sobbed until she made herself sick. Eventually, I had to get her help.”

He pulled a sheet out of his folder, placing it before Chantel. “That’s a signed letter from her psychiatrist and it’s in her school records, as well. It states that she could have recurring episodes later in life.” He looked briefly at Tad and then back at Chantel.

“Her psychiatrist believes that her mother’s passing just as Miranda was entering puberty was likely the catalyst that sent her over the edge. Her emotions became too much for her handle, and her psyche invented a way for her to check out. She’ll do fine for a while, and then she’ll relapse. Often in cycle with hormonal changes. Which is what happened shortly after my grandson was born. She got it in her head that I was going to try to take him from her and so she ran, taking him from me.”

The man looked from Chantel, to Tad, and then back, his tone soft, compassionate. “I never intended to take him. A child needs his mother, and it was obvious that she adored him. And that she was taking good care of him. But knowing her...challenges, I felt it was my duty to keep them close by. A newborn baby—if something happened to him, and I knew about her issues and did nothing...”

His voice trailed off, leaving the obvious unsaid.

Maybe for Miranda’s sake.

“The night Dana took Jeffrey out of his crib in the middle of the night and fled into the dark, I’d driven to Asheville, stopped by her apartment, asking her to move back home to Charlotte. She was living alone, said the father of her baby was dead, but I couldn’t believe her at that point. When she has her episodes, she tells lies that even she believes are true.”

Tad listened. Hearing sense. Logic. A tragic, tragic correlation of events.