Heather(54)

“And now, sweetheart, do you need a ride? Where are you?”

You rattle off your address and Brenda hums. “We have a volunteer who lives out that way, someone who can assist you. She drives a white minivan. Her name is Tammy. She’ll pick you up at 9:00, okay?”

“Yes, okay, thank you so much, thank you.” Miss Hamilton has spotted you, her brow furrows. You hold up a finger.

“You’re so welcome, darling. You have a wonderful day, okay, and we’ll see you soon.”

Miss Hamilton approaches you bearing the two paper cups.

“Making a phone call?”

“I was calling my dad. To tell him about the test.”

“What did he say?”

“He didn’t pick up.”

“I thought I heard you saying thank you to someone.”

“I—It was his secretary.” The lie is so blatant and absurd that Miss Hamilton is caught off guard. Something you’ve cribbed from TV.

“Here,” she says finally, holding out the steaming cup. You follow her to the car and a few times you can feel her deciding to say something and then changing her mind. The quiet has a choked air about it. Kate Bush sings about her broken heart. But as you sip your drink, the sugar and milk oversweet, then chalky on your tongue, you feel a thrill of hope. You don’t need Miss Hamilton. You don’t need Sabrina. Help has come just in time and you found it all on your own. Monday. You hold the word close in your mind, a mantra. Everything will be right again after Monday. And what had sounded so false moments ago now feels true: You’ll take the test again. You’ll fix your mistakes. You’ll get everything right the next time around. Everything will go according to plan.





CALLIE


As Thanksgiving approaches, she finds herself in a low mood, worse this year after Healy’s revelation. Mid-November is always hard for her, the descent into the darkest part of the year. Every radio commercial, every supermarket display, every conversation she overhears about family gatherings and dinner plans feels mocking, cruel.

Solve the Baby Doe case and she solves the mystery of who she is. But, she’s running out of road on the Riley girls. She feels a heaviness in her body and she thinks it must be because Jenna is really gone this time. Jenna, who could unlock so many answers. Who took the truth with her, wherever she went.

Callie can’t say she’s not angry. It hits her out of nowhere, little frustrations—a hasty incident report, the heat in her Jeep acting up—tipping her into a teeth-clenching fury. She overhears Keegan joke to Deveraux that Chief must be raging with PMS.

Still, despite this roiling anger she stops by her mother’s house once a week, sometimes more. She opens drawers and flicks on the lights. She waters the flowers on the step until the first frost kills them off. And most of all, Callie chastises herself. She’s been in this work long enough to know that people can hide whole universes of secrets inside their daily lives. Drug habits, trafficking rings, escort work. She mistook proximity for closeness, but Jenna had been right, the night Callie brought her into the station. When was the last time Callie asked Jenna a question about her life? She thought that she saw all of the woman who raised her. But there were so many questions that she hadn’t asked, so many avenues unexplored. And now she will probably never get the chance.

She’s angry at herself, too. No way around that.

Fauver had been with Sabrina Riley. Fauver had been her mother’s last phone call before she disappeared. He’s the one person that links the two of them. She feels nauseated whenever she considers the possibility of Fauver’s DNA making up half of who she is. He had claimed he never slept with Sabrina but he’s not exactly a man she takes at his word. Maybe there’s a reason Jenna kept the secret of her father’s identity from her: The truth was too ugly, too hard, to reveal. Callie considers a new side to her mother—protective—and realizes that she was wrong about who her father was, but also wrong about who Jenna was. And if she ever gets the chance, it’s the first thing she’ll say to her. That she’s sorry about everything she didn’t, couldn’t, see.



* * *



Aside from the Baby Doe case her work at the station churns on. Meetings with local administrators, more grant applications, calls to the local lab to rush the testing on the drugs she’s confiscated, paperwork paperwork paperwork. The guys seem to have settled into a grudging kind of respect for her, or so she thinks until she pulls into her driveway after the end of a long day to find a tail hanging out of her mailbox. Dark, with a white stripe down it.

Fucking bastards. She pounds her fist against the steering wheel. A skunk?

She has half a mind to drive straight to the tavern, toss the animal remains in the middle of the table where she knows she’ll find Collins and Latour and Reynolds three drinks deep, red-faced, Miller Lite on their breath.

She can’t bear the thought of dealing with it anymore. She stomps out of her car, shaking, and her eyes catch on her neighbor’s wood pile. The axe rested against the side.

“I’m borrowing this!” she shouts, not waiting for an answer. Her first swing is wild, misses, so that the weight of the axe pulls on her arm, aches.

She connects on the second attempt, lets out a grunt, furious and satisfied. Two more swings and the mailbox is severed from its post. She’s sweating all over, her nostrils sting, her eyes water, but she wishes she had thought of this weeks ago. She picks up the splintered post and carries the whole thing to the end of her driveway, tosses it in her empty trash can.