I charged his son at four o'clock. By midnight I was in his fire station with my hands on him.
Four days a week my office is nine feet by eleven, and Cal Mercer sits on the other side of it.
One desk. Four feet of county laminate. A door that stays open because the room has no ventilation. A forty-four year single dad, forearms the work built — and a burn scar he won't explain.
He doesn't perform. That's the problem. He tells me no without raising his voice. When he decides I need to understand something, he doesn't explain it. He makes me experience it myself.
I've started hearing myself breathe in before he walks past my chair.
I have spent four years being the one person in this county who doesn't bend. It is the only thing I have ever been able to say about myself without qualifying it.
Then I found the gap in his field notebook. A set of tire impressions that belong there and aren't.
I know whose truck made them. I'm the one prosecuting the boy who drives it.
Every hour I don't report it, I stop being the woman who could.
So I haven't written it down. Three weeks now.
And there's a county plat map I saw open on my father's desk at Christmas, with eleven parcels drawn on it in a row like ribs — four of them already burned.
I can pull that thread to save Cal's son or I can keep my father.
I've never once chosen wrong. I'm about to.
Genre: Romance
Four days a week my office is nine feet by eleven, and Cal Mercer sits on the other side of it.
One desk. Four feet of county laminate. A door that stays open because the room has no ventilation. A forty-four year single dad, forearms the work built — and a burn scar he won't explain.
He doesn't perform. That's the problem. He tells me no without raising his voice. When he decides I need to understand something, he doesn't explain it. He makes me experience it myself.
I've started hearing myself breathe in before he walks past my chair.
I have spent four years being the one person in this county who doesn't bend. It is the only thing I have ever been able to say about myself without qualifying it.
Then I found the gap in his field notebook. A set of tire impressions that belong there and aren't.
I know whose truck made them. I'm the one prosecuting the boy who drives it.
Every hour I don't report it, I stop being the woman who could.
So I haven't written it down. Three weeks now.
And there's a county plat map I saw open on my father's desk at Christmas, with eleven parcels drawn on it in a row like ribs — four of them already burned.
I can pull that thread to save Cal's son or I can keep my father.
I've never once chosen wrong. I'm about to.
Genre: Romance