Page 104 of Worth the Fall

It kills me. In every sense of the word.

Why does this little girl trust Grant so much? More so, why would a little girl know a police officer enough to trust him?

And then I remember the code 10-16—domestic abuse. Grant told dispatch that he’d been to every one of the previous calls to this address.

Every.

One.

How many times has he been here?

I push the thoughts and scenarios from my mind. I don’t want to think or assume, but it doesn’t stop the sting of tears in my eyes as he reaches out and holds her little hand in his.

Because it’s real. Grant’s hero complex and his need to save everyone is real, and I’m watching it firsthand.

He and Keely are pointing to the smaller rocks around them, and after a bit, I hear her giggle. It’s the most adorable sound in the world. All I can do is stare. And wonder. And hope she’s outside because whatever happened inside doesn’t involve her.

I’m not sure how long I sit and stare at the two of them, but it’s long enough that my feet are numb from their positioning and the sky has slowly faded to black. So lost in thought, I’m startled when Grant slides behind the wheel, starts the car, and pulls away from the curb.

“The fucker’s lucky he wasn’t home,” he mutters under his breath but doesn’t elaborate, and I don’t ask for more.

I turn some in my seat so I can study him and try to wrap my head around how the man, who seemed so at ease moments ago with a little girl, now feels like a ticking time bomb. The lights from passing cars and streetlamps lighten and darken the features of his face, leaving me to wonder what’s going on in that mind of his. I’d also love to pepper him with questions about what the call was all about, but for a woman who doesn’t like to answer questions herself, the safe strategy is to keep my mouth shut.

We drive for some time, winding up through the hills around Sunnyville until Grant pulls off the asphalt and onto a graded road. We continue for a ways, and it’s only when he pulls into a clearing that overlooks the city and all of its lights below that I know where we are: Grant’s place he goes to think.

Our silence stretches, long and thick and heavy, but with the windows down, the sounds of the nightlife around us soften the tension in it. Every part of me wants to ease whatever is upsetting him but I have no clue how to even begin to do that.

“You want to talk about it?” I ask, hoping enough time has passed that he can think rationally about whatever happened.

His sigh is heavy. “I’m not sure that I can.”

“Because it’s a case?”

Without answering, Grant opens the door and gets out of the truck. I watch him pace back and forth, the moonlight above accentuating the tension seizing his posture. I slip out of the cab and find a flat slope of rock near the front of his truck and take a seat, cross my legs, and focus on the twinkling lights of the city. They almost look like embers burning in the bottom of a fire pit, and I wonder what each of those lights represent.

Is one of them Keely’s?

How many of them hide the horror happening beneath their cover?

I shake the thought away. Too much thinking for tonight. Too much delving into a past I don’t want to delve into.

“Remember the side of your house?” Everything inside me freezes. The minute I’m determined to get out of my own past, he brings me right back into it. “Remember how we used to go and sit there and play whatever the hell we used to play back then because you wanted to get outside? Sometimes, you’d paint those rocks of yours with silly pictures, other times I’d play Barbies with you. I hated it, but I played because you were always playing cops and robbers with me?”

“No.” I whisper the word, not sure if it’s because I don’t want to remember or because I don’t want to talk about it.

Either he doesn’t hear me or he doesn’t care, because he keeps talking. “After you left, I used to go there. I’d just sit there by myself because I missed you so much. I’d pretend that you were inside and you were going to come out to play any minute.”

Every part of me wants to reject what he’s saying. I want to cover my ears like the little girl he remembers would have done and shut him out. I don’t want to know that he was hurt, too. It’s so much easier to think I was the only one who hurt. It’s so much easier to remember how much I hated him for pulling my world apart instead of looking at it like an adult and realizing he did the right thing.

But I don’t lift my hands. I don’t turn to face him. I need to hear this. I need to listen to him. I need to face what I don’t want to know and am scared to death to remember.

“I missed you, Em. You were my best friend. You were the one I told all my silly secrets to. You were part of my every day, and then you were gone . . .”

I told him my secrets, too. But mine were far from any secret an eight-year-old should have.

I push up from where I’m seated and walk a few feet away from him, hating the hurt in his voice that somehow I had a part in putting there. But at the same time, I’m angry at him for driving me up here where I can’t exactly escape the conversation.

Was this his plan? Trap me here and force me to talk?