Lisa Gardner - Say Goodbye

And there were tears on my cheeks and snot pouring from my nose and I couldn’t stop. I couldn’t stop. Because I loved my brother so damn much that I hated him. I loved him for being alive. I hated him for not being me. I loved him for having such a pretty little girlfriend. I hated him for having my mother’s dimple. I loved him because he escaped. And I hated him because I wasn’t his brother anymore and that’s the thing in the world I most wanted to be.

So I beat up his truck. I smashed the living daylights out of glass and steel until I heard the engine gun and had only a second to leap away.

My brother tore down the dirt road, away from the crazy boy wielding a tree limb.

My brother drove away from me.

KIMBERLY GOT HOME LATE. HOUSE WAS DARK, EXCEPT for the usual light in the hallway, and the small pool of illumination on the kitchen desk where Mac had piled her mail and phone messages. No happy face tonight. Instead, the top sticky note displayed a crude drawing of branching lines ending in small ovals. It took her a moment, then she got it: an olive branch.

The picture made her smile even as she felt a sting of tears.

Her husband was such a better person than she was. How had she gotten so lucky?

She should go to him. Tell him she was sorry and ask for his forgiveness. Then again, was it really appropriate to apologize for pursuing a case she had no intention of giving up?

She paced the kitchen, keyed up in that way she always got when starting a new investigation, brain churning, adrenaline pumping. Delilah Rose equaled Ginny Jones. And Ginny Jones equaled…? Victim, accomplice, something worse?

She opened the refrigerator, reached for a beer. Caught herself, sighed, and put it back.

Into the living room now, staring at the darkened shadows of the leather couch, Mac’s recliner, their way-too-big TV. When she was a little girl, she used to practice creeping through the house at night. Not Mandy. No, her older sister was scared of the dark, slept in a room with two nightlights and a lamp blazing at all times. But Kimberly saw nighttime as an adventure. Could she tiptoe from her bedroom on the second story, all the way down to the front door of their four-bedroom Colonial without making a sound?

She would imagine she was stalking bad men. Or, she was outsmarting an intruder who had already entered her house. Nighttime brought monsters and for as long as Kimberly could remember, she wanted to fight them.

Most of the time, her insomniac father caught her in the act.

“Kimberly,” he would say, “what are you doing out of bed?”

And she, embarrassed about being caught, and not wanting to admit to her Super Cop father that she was stalking shadows, would say, “I just wanted a drink of water.”

He would watch her for a while. Silence had always been her father’s best weapon and he had wielded it masterfully. Eventually, he would go into the kitchen and return with a glass of water.

“Third step from the top,” he informed her. “It squeaks.”

And the next night, she would get a little farther into the shadows.

After her father moved out, she roamed the house at will. Her mother slept soundly, and until she was fourteen and discovered boys, Mandy had no use for midnight excursions. Just Kimberly would make the rounds, night after night. Keeping her mother and sister safe. Because Super Cop was gone now and she was all the protection against monsters her family had left.

Until the day she went off to college, and Mandy and her mother had been murdered.

Fuck it. Kimberly went to the bedroom.

Mac appeared to be sleeping, one arm flung up over his head, the other curved over his stomach.

She left him alone. Crossed into the bathroom, where she brushed her teeth, scrubbed her face, combed out her hair. She shed her clothes, found her pajamas, opening lots of drawers and the closet doors along the way. Back to the kitchen for a glass of water, setting it down firmly on the nightstand.

Tossing back the covers. Jumping into bed.

Mac grunted.

“Oh,” she declared brightly. “You’re awake!”

Mac peeled open one eye, then covered it again with his arm.

She thumped his shoulder lightly. “Faker.”

“Am not.”

“Pulleeeze. I’ve seen this act before.”

He didn’t protest anymore, but opened both eyes. For a moment, they regarded each other warily.

“I liked your drawing,” she said softly.

“I’m not a very good artist.”

“Good enough.”

“I don’t like it when we fight,” he said abruptly.

“Me, neither.”

“And I don’t like worrying about you. And I don’t like waking up some mornings, realizing we’re about to be parents and we’ve never even had a puppy. How do we know if we can feed this thing, or bathe it, or keep it alive? You know what I realized for the first time yesterday?”

She shook her head.

“We don’t have a ficus tree. Kimberly, how are we going to be good parents, when our current lifestyle doesn’t even allow for plants?”

“I guess we won’t feed the baby Miracle-Gro.”

He sat up, the covers falling to his waist. With his dark hair sleep-rumpled, his lean face intent, he looked sexy, serious, the man she fell in love with all those years ago. The man who had proposed to her, buck naked, the night before she was to make a ransom drop and the situation was dangerous enough they both knew she wouldn’t wear the ring.

He had let her go the next morning, to do what she needed to do, and she had loved him for that.

She reached over now, touched his face gently. “I saw Delilah Rose,” she said, because there was no other way to do it. “It turns out she’s actually Ginny Jones, kidnapped, she claims, two years ago, and forced into a life of prostitution to stay alive. She alleges her kidnapper killed her mother and is systematically picking off other hookers one by one. She provided no details, physical description, or corroborative information, but Sal believes he has enough to pursue a case. And I’m going to help him. At least until we get enough to put together a full task force.”

“You won’t quit even then,” Mac said.

“I don’t know. Once the baby comes, I’ll have to.”

“You’ll work it from your hospital bed, that’s what you’ll do.”

Her hand fell away. She studied the sheets. “You’re right,” she said shortly. “I’m not a quitter. Not in my marriage, and not in my job.”

He didn’t say anything right away. She sensed she should look at him, but couldn’t bring herself to do it. She had no problem chasing down an informant on a secluded road late at night, or looking for a hunter’s severed head. But here, in her own house, sitting cross-legged in bed next to her husband, feeling the tension between them, she was afraid.

“Kimberly,” Mac said quietly, “I’ve been offered a promotion. Special agent in charge of the Regional Drug Enforcement Office in Savannah.”

She glanced at him, dumbfounded. “But Savannah…” Savannah was way to the southeast, on the South Carolina border, closer to Hilton Head than Atlanta. The city was large enough to command a respectable GBI presence. A solid RDEO, an excellent promotion. And much too far away to work while living in Roswell.