Rather than act guilty, I instead turned my computer screen toward the other detective that had stepped up beside me. Roland had the desk closest to mine, so I’d talked to him more than anyone else. Out of all the other detectives in the unit, he was the only one I could maybe call a friend, and that was only because we’d got lunch together a few times.
“I’m just looking up some old cases. I was volunteering at the hospital last night, and I came across a patient that I thought we might have some info on.”
Roland leaned closer to look at the screen, but he barely glanced at the digital files before he quickly lost interest and returned to his own desk.
“You volunteer at the hospital during your time off?”
Shrugging, I closed out of the file system. It wasn’t helping anyway.
“It’s something I’ve been doing for a while now, even before I moved here. I like it. It makes the patients happy, and... I don’t know. It’s great being the one to cause happiness for once, you know.”
At the desk next to me, Roland had his feet kicked up so he was leaning on the back legs of his chair, tossing jellybeans up into the air to catch them in his mouth.
“Yeah, I get that,” he said after swallowing the candy. “Bad guys are never happy to see us, and the victims we save are always at their worst moments. We rarely get to see their healing journey.”
He tossed another jellybean and caught it, crushing it between his teeth before turning to look at me.
“But don’t burn yourself out. You need other hobbies, away from all this stuff. It gets in your head, and pretty soon, you think the whole world is filled with nothing but victims and criminals.”
“Yeah, I know,” I agreed, though deep down what he said sounded familiar. Sometimes it really did feel like there were only two kinds of people in the world. “I’ll be careful. But I like to help where I can.”
“Great!”
Letting his feet drop down from his desk, Roland tossed a stack of files in front of me.
“Then you can help me with this paperwork for my latest case.”
I groaned, but my hand was already reaching for a pen as I opened the pile on the top of the stack. John Doe’s case didn’t have enough information, yet other cases like this one were drowning in too much information.
There really needed to be a better balance.
CHAPTER 5
Mia
The reading voice was back.This time, I paid enough attention to tell it was a man’s voice, but that was all I knew. It wasn’t someone I recognized. I just knew it was the same voice that had read to me before.
The same voice reading the a new, yet familiar, story.
“The difference between him and the other boys at such a time was that they knew it was make-believe, while to him make-believe and true were exactly the same thing.”
Make-believe?
That was the same word my father had used when he finally explained to me why mother was gone.
After mother’s funeral, I’d been moved into his house, given a bedroom and a place at the dinner table along with his new wife and his new kids. They didn’t want me there and I didn’t want to be there, but there I was, anyway.
My first week with my father was nothing but arguments. They told me to change my clothes and wear something more “boy” appropriate. I refused. I demanded to know why my mother had gone away permanently, but they refused to answer.
At one point, father tried taking my clothes away so I’d have no choice but to wear something else. In return, I started sleeping with all my clothes tucked under me like a nest, hording them as if they were gold and I was a fierce dragon that needed to be slain. At seventeen years old, I was still small enough that he could have overpowered me and taken my clothes by force, but not easily, and not without leaving marks that would have gotten him in trouble.
That seemed to be the last straw, and in a fit of rage he finally explained why my mother was gone.
Before me, Mother had been pregnant with another child.
A daughter.
That girl’s name was to be Mia. My mother had lost that child in her third trimester of the pregnancy and at that time, something inside her had apparently snapped. At least, according to my father.