Tara Taylor Quinn - Mother by Fate

He was a good father. It was the only reason Sara had spent the past three years biting her tongue and sending her money. The alimony she had no choice but to pay. She came from a wealthy family. And had made a poor marriage choice.

Bessie wasn’t at fault for that. And for the first two years of the little girl’s life, Sara had been the little girl’s only mother. She’d thought she would be her forever mother.

“I know the ropes, Jason. You don’t have to repeat your victim’s tale every time we speak.” Yes, she’d left him, drastically downsizing his lifestyle.

But only after she’d caught him cheating on her. More than once.

“It’s wrong that you don’t let me see her.”

“You’re the one who chose to leave us. I don’t want her to get confused with various mothers coming in and out of her life. Or having to choose loyalties...”

He was afraid that if Sara was in Bessie’s life the day would come when Bessie would choose to come to live with Sara.

“When she’s eighteen, she’ll be able to make her own choice,” Sara reminded him.

“She was two when you left. I hardly think she’ll remember you.” The man was stupid, hurting her while asking her for money.

Stupid and smart enough to win, too. He had her over a barrel and he knew it. Her love for Bessie was as unconditional as any mother’s love. She’d give the little girl whatever she needed.

“Just don’t be late with my pictures again,” she said. They were the only way she could watch her little girl grow up.

“I won’t. I am sorry about that,” he said. And she knew he meant it. Just as she knew that every dime she sent for Bessie’s care was spent exactly as she meant it to be spent.

Jason wasn’t going to screw up a good thing. Not for himself, and not for Bessie, either. He truly doted on the little girl.

He didn’t call Sara for the basics. The general child-care things he handled on his own. Just as, while he’d fought for alimony, he’d never asked for child support during their divorce settlement. He was savvy, the jerk she’d married. If he’d made an agreement to accept child support from Sara, she’d have had grounds to argue her right to see the girl.

“I’ll transfer the money by Monday,” she said. They banked at the same institution—Jason’s doing—so that she could make online transfers. She couldn’t take money out of his account. And he couldn’t see hers at all. But she was able to transfer funds to his account at any time.

Her alimony payments went through the court. And unless he married, they would continue to do so for another seven years.

“Thanks, Sara.” Jason’s tone was congenial now. As if they were old friends. All the tension had left his voice. As it always did. No matter how much of a scum he’d just been. Asking for money. Or having sex behind his wife’s back. He was Jason. He was entitled.

“How is she?” Sara asked. He was going to hang up.

“Good. Real good.”

“How did she do with the swimming lessons?”

“It was rough at first. You know how she hates having her head underwater...”

She had at two. That could have changed.

“But in the end, she was swimming like a fish.”

“Underwater?”

“Not as easily, but yeah.”

Sara smiled. Bessie was one determined little girl. She was proud of her.

“So, yeah, I hate to cut you off, but I gotta go, Sara, I have to...”

Sara might have forced him to talk to her a little longer—after all, she hadn’t transferred the money yet—but her phone buzzed with an incoming call.

“I do, too. Bye,” she said to her ex, and clicked over to take the other call.

“Lila, what’s up?” The managing director of the Lemonade Stand, the unique, privately funded women’s shelter where Sara worked, didn’t ever call her at home just to chat. “It’s Nicole. She’s gone.”

“What do you mean gone ? She left?” Dropping her towel, Sara reached for the closest pair of cotton pants she had. With the phone propped between her shoulder and her ear, she slipped into underwear and then her pants. “It doesn’t make sense,” she said, buttoning the pants with fingers that fumbled in her haste. “Why would she go? She’s not safe and... She called someone and got word that her son was being moved, didn’t she?”

It was the sole reason the woman would leave the only place where she was safe. Where her secrets were safe.

“She made a call,” Lila confirmed. “But no, she told one of the girls that Toby hadn’t been moved yet.”

There was a neighbor in LA across the street from where Nicole had lived with her husband and son, an older woman Nicole’s ex didn’t even notice, who’d been keeping an eye on things for Nicole. Specifically on her son. Because Trevor, Toby’s father, a white-supremacist higher-up in a national neo-Nazi organization was going to run with him. Nicole knew it. Now the police knew it. And if he did run, the woman would never see her son again. Worse, the boy would have little chance but to be indoctrinated by the man who’d spawned him for one purpose only. To populate the world with white men who hated anyone who wasn’t a white man.

White men who believed that ridding the earth of nonwhites was their God-given purpose.

If Nicole didn’t get Toby away, the boy would most likely grow up to be just like his dad. As Trevor had done before him.

Sara had a bra on and was in the process of pulling a short-sleeved cotton top over her head. “She wouldn’t leave,” she said. “Not without Toby.”

Late the night before, the Santa Raquel police had promised Nicole they’d get her son out of Trevor’s house and into safe custody, after the LA Police Department had withdrawn the warrant that had been issued for her arrest. A child-welfare representative, a member of the High Risk Team, had already been briefed and was waiting for Toby to arrive in Santa Raquel.

“She left,” Lila said, her voice unusually agitated. “She was at the thrift shop, looking for some jeans...” All they’d had in the on-campus store were women’s sizes. Nicole, who was twenty-seven years old and five foot two, barely weighed a hundred pounds. “And then she was gone. Out the side door where we empty the trash...”

The thrift shop, one of the many businesses operated by the Lemonade Stand that were open to the public and provided the shelter’s primary means of support, fronted an open city street. Residents accessed it through a back exit, and from there the only admittance to the locked grounds of the Stand was via fingerprint recognition.

A new safety measure that had been instigated over the summer as part of the work the High Risk Team was doing.

“She got spooked,” Sara said, slipping into a pair of light blue flats, then slinging her bag over her shoulder before heading out the door. “Dammit, someone was there. Someone scared her into running.”

“From what we heard last night, if Trevor gets hold of her she’s as good as dead.”

“And then he has Toby all to himself,” Sara said. “You’ve already alerted everyone...”

“Of course.”

“I’m on my way.”

“Good.”

Sara and Lila, in these jobs they worked together, had seen more ugliness than most people ever would. Lila always appeared to handle it all calmly.

With only the briefest shrug of disappointment about the fact that she wouldn’t have been able to have her dinner date with Hot Pool Guy that night, Sara drove carefully, but over the speed limit to the Lemonade Stand. There wasn’t much she could do at this point, but maybe there would be. Once she talked with some of the women. They might relax and open up to her more easily than they would with a member of law enforcement. Maybe one of them saw something that would give them a clue as to where Nicole had gone.