Page 16 of Tarek

She had discovered that sitting up was useful for more than simply being propped beside us. She could sit on her own now, roll wherever she wanted to go, and was starting to scoot herself around when she spotted something interesting. She'd also discovered that bouncing in her jumper was excellent fun, and I had a feeling crawling wasn't far away. I wasn't sure whether to be excited or terrified by that, and honestly, I was a bit of both.

We'd left Panama City behind once I’d completed the course and saved enough to make the move with a small safety cushion and, to my parents' dismay, were living in a long-term motel in Titusville, which was far enough away that nobody knew our names or what we'd been through. Being on the other coast, there were enough tourists and snowbirds that no one paid us any real mind anyway, and it wasn't home, not really. The room was small, the kitchenette barely deserved the name, and three children and a dog had a way of making even a decent-sized room feel crowded.

Best of all, there were no memories of Philip attached to the walls. No kitchen where I'd once made dinner while believing my marriage was perfectly ordinary. No dining room table or living room where we'd sat and shared meals, watched TV, and planned trips and talked about our day. No driveway where his car had sat while he was secretly living another life. No neighbors who'd watched our family fall apart. No well-meaning people asking how I was doing and then looking uncomfortable when I answered honestly. And my parents weren't around to hover and look uncertain of what to say or do or give me pitying looks when they thought I wasn't looking. No mutual friends or any of his coworkers to run into at the supermarket for painful, awkward encounters. All of these things mattered more than I wanted to admit.

I was still working from home as a paralegal, which had been one of the few pieces of my old life I'd managed to salvage without feeling like I was dragging the wreckage along behind me. My employer had been remarkably understanding through everything, and working from home gave me the flexibility I needed to be able to pick up and simply move. After I bought a car to replace the one that had been seized as an asset, as it had Philip's name on the title, both cars had. This one wasn't new, but it was reliable, purchased from a local garage after it was brought in for repairs and the owner refused to pay and abandoned it. It was twenty years old, but solid thanks to being kept parked in a garage instead of outside where the salt air could eat away at it, though there were a few minor rust spots on the corner of the tailgate and the side rear door of it. It was mine for the princely sum of fifteen hundred bucks and mechanically sound, had decent gas mileage, and as a seven-seater minivan, fit all of us, our dog, and luggage inside with room to spare. It also made taking the kids to the nearby beach at the Canaveral National Park rather easy for a cheap and fun family day out.

The old me would have been aghast at driving such an old car, but perfectly content working from home doing the paperwork needed by my boss and taking the kids out for small day trips. That day on the couch at my parents' had awakened me, though, and the new me had definitely wanted something more.

I'd spent sixteen weeks at the community college taking an introductory course in policing and criminal investigations while my mom played babysitter. It wasn't something I'd ever expected to be doing at thirty-four, especially while juggling work, three children, and everything else, but I'd surprised myself with how much I loved it. The classes had made something click.

I'd always wanted to be a police officer, but I'd just never done anything about it. I'd looked into the coursework and training, sure, but before I had made up my mind for certain, I'd met Philip, and he'd changed the direction of my life. He urged me to become a paralegal instead, pointing out that once we had kids, I could go part-time or work from home so we'd not have to pay for childcare. He'd put an engagement ring on my finger fairly quickly, and it seemed like fate - I'd always wanted a husband and kids and a dog, the whole picket-fence thing, and his words made a lot of sense. So that's what I did. Then we'd adopted Evan and Matt, and eventually Laura came along. There had always been something else that needed doing, someone who needed me, another reason to not take that old dream of mine down off the shelf and reexamine it.

It was a good career, and I was good at it. I'd never regretted the work itself, and it had allowed me to support my family while being there for the kids, which became vital once I lost Philip's much larger salary. Now, though, the new Darren was taking stock of his options and remembering who he had been before Philip. The man who had wanted to become a policeman to help people, and instead became a paralegal who helped people but only during their property buying or selling journey. I wanted to be able to help more people.

I'd just spent months watching what happened when someone used trust to hurt an entire family while being on the receiving end. I'd learned how easily the victims could become collateral damage while everyone else concentrated on the person who had committed the crime. I'd seen what financial crimes could do to spouses and children, how many people could be affected by one person's choices, and how helpless it could feel when the person responsible was someone you loved.

I wanted to help people like that, as well as people who had their cat stuck on a roof or were simply lost. I wanted my kind of helping to really matter, in a fundamental way, both personally and to the community, and maybe, along the way, I could be like that officer at the office who had stopped and comforted my son when Philip had been led away, someone who could make things a little less scary for someone else experiencing the worst day of their life. The problem was that being a police officer wasn't exactly the safest career choice for a single father. I took the sixteen-week course anyway.

Now, course completed and having moved, still working my old job, I was sitting at the little table in our motel room. I was staring at the information packet from the community college here in Titusville while Laura played on the floor nearby. Evan and Matt were arguing quietly over a toy car, which meant they were probably going to be shouting about it within the next five minutes.

I rubbed a hand over my face. There were two options in front of me. I could apply to the police academy or I could keep going with school and work toward a full associate's degree, giving myself more options before deciding exactly where I wanted my career to go. Before Titusville would sponsor me to be trained, I needed reliable childcare during the academy and later for my shifts. For the degree, I still needed childcare. There were nearby daycares I could use, including one a hop and a skip away from the college, as long as I went during the day.

The sensible choice was probably the degree. Hell, the safer choice was definitely the degree, but every time I thought about policing, something inside me came alive. It probably didn't help that I'd started binging The Rookie in the evenings while the kids played with their cars or colored or slept, thanks to the miracle of cheap headphones making it so I didn't disturb them. The only thing holding me back wasn't even trying to find childcare. It was the danger. My kids had already lost one parent. I couldn't in good conscience pile on the risk of them losing another.

"No! You know that's my favorite!" Matt wailed.

"It's my favorite too!" Evan replied angrily.

Okay, time to get up off my ass and break this up.

"Okay," I said, standing up and stretching. "It's about time for dinner. How about you guys pick up your toys and, instead of cooking tonight, we'll go to Popeye's and bring us back some chicken?"

I'd said the magic words. The car was instantly forgotten as they hurriedly scooped up their cars and put them in the small handled bucket I'd gotten them for just that purpose. A quick diaper change for little miss, and we were out the door, returning a little over half an hour later with enough chicken and biscuits to feed an army. I quickly threw several towels over the bed and settled us down to eat, letting Matt pick the show. He picked Andy Griffith of all things, saying he and Grandpa watched it after school back in Panama City and he liked it. It was an easy enough, relaxing show to watch, but Andy was the sheriff of his town, and I found myself wishing for a place like Mayberry where it was so safe, his deputy didn't have to worry about being the worst shot in history and thus carried his only bullet in his shirt pocket.

The next day I had to wash clothes and get the chicken grease out of the hotel towels, so I headed to the motel's laundry room. While waiting for a free washer while someone else emptied theirs into a nearby dryer, I browsed the fliers and notice board, my eyes landing on a brochure put out by the Mylos and the Dragonii. I took one with me, not quite sure why other than the fact that it was, well, intriguing.

A few days later, I came across the brochure I'd picked up while tidying our room while the boys were at school. Laura was happily bouncing up and down in her doorway jumper, as I'd clamped it to the front door frame and put a wedge under the front door to keep it open for some air. Skye was behind the baby gate in the bathroom, so I had no worries there unless she suddenly decided to revert to her earliest puppyhood days and eat the roll of toilet paper after yanking it off the holder.

"Huh. Never did read this," I muttered to myself, and I almost threw it in the trash. "Hold on a minute," I said, just before letting go. "The Mylos fund college and provide a full stipend which can be used to pay for all a student's living expenses, expanded to cover any family and pets they're responsible for." There was also the fact that you had to take that mate test, which was why most didn't, but the prospect of not having to juggle work and college and adding daycare expenses to our already tight budget? It was tempting. Very, very tempting. I sat down on the bed and stared at the pair of smiling aliens.

7

TAREK

Ihad been working security aboard the Wayfarer’s Fortune for nearly three years, and by that point, I knew exactly what the job meant.

It meant walking cargo holds. It meant monitoring corridors, checking manifests, breaking up fights, accompanying shipments, and making sure nobody decided that the boxes we were carrying would look better in their own cargo bay. It meant standing around while other people loaded and unloaded freight, then checking it all again because somebody somewhere had decided paperwork was more important than common sense.

It meant retrieving Rell.

Rell was a Mylos cargo technician who had the dubious distinction of being the only crewman I'd personally had to collect from three different portside establishments because he'd had too much to drink and forgotten that the Wayfarer's Fortune was leaving without him. At six and a half feet, he was short for a Mylos, but he was still a damned big man when I had to haul him upright.

That trip, the first time he'd been asleep under a table. The second, he'd been arguing with a vending machine and not liking it when it kept apologising to him for not having the snack he wanted. The third time, he'd apparently decided that the best place to spend the last two hours before departure was on top of a bar.

I was beginning to think he'd made it a personal challenge. This time, I found him in a drinking establishment on Kessara Station that smelled strongly of fried meat, spilled alcohol, and whatever industrial cleaner the owners used to pretend they cared about hygiene.

“Rell.”