Page 97 of Before This Ends (Before)

“I’m in love with you,” I whisper, and her muscles bunch. “You?”

She lies there for a long time, then moves her cheek against my chest, and I feel wetness where her face rubbed. “I keep waiting for you to make me work for the things that always seemed so difficult in my other relationships.” I feel her tip her head back, and I can barely make out her features in the dim light from the streetlamp. “I love you, Miles Thatcher, not because you’re an amazing dad or a great brother, and not because you’re the kind of man who makes this world safer.” She lifts her hand, resting it against my cheek. “I love you, because you have proven to me what my parents had wasn’t a fluke, that love—when it’s meant to be—is easy.”

“Jesus, Em.”

“Thank you for giving that to me.” She leans up, touching her lips to the edge of mine, then curls into my chest.

I lie there wide-awake, staring at the dark ceiling as her breathing evens out, thinking about my life and all I’ve accomplished, how much happiness I’ve experienced. Thinking about my family, my brothers, my daughter and now the woman in my arms, knowing I likely wouldn’t have any of what I do now or be able to appreciate it fully if I never lost my mom when I did.

That pain left inside me from her loss has been replaced with an overwhelming amount of thankfulness for what she unknowingly gave me in the end.

CHAPTER35

miles

Standing in one of the windowless rooms at the station, with my arms crossed over my chest, I watch the video footage the gas station near Kelly’s house sent over. Footage Martinez had been combing through up until about ten minutes ago, when he came and got me and Chief Marshall.

“There it is.” Martinez points at Grace’s car as it drives by the gas station, but that’s not what catches my attention. Kelly’s truck following it does. It’s still not definitive proof that he murdered Anna and Grace, but it’s too much of a coincidence, given everything else, even without the DNA back yet. Those two girls would have had no reason to be driving by a gas station near his house at one in the morning the night before they were found in the trunk of Grace’s car. Especially with him seeming to follow them down a road that I know from being in that area is rarely traveled.

“Gather some men and bring him in,” Marshall, standing next to me, bites out, and I let my arms fall to my sides. “And bring in his wife.”

“Do we fill in the state police and let them know we’re going to get him?” Martinez asks, pushing back from the table he’s sitting at.

“I’ll make that phone call.” Marshall walks out of the room without another look at either of us.

Leaving the room, I send Tucker a message, seeing if he’s available to help us out while Martinez gets a hold of a couple of the other officers who were there the day we got Kelly’s DNA.

It takes us about an hour to get a team together, and two more hours to track him down. When we get him into the station, I watch him through the double-sided mirror as he sits alone, his wife Cristy sitting in the interrogation room on the other side of our viewing room. Neither knows the other is there since we picked up Kelly when he was at work.

Where he might look like he doesn’t have a care in the world, she’s scared.

With my eyes on his wife through the other mirrored wall, I see the door open next to her and Tucker step into her room with a folder in his hand.

“Mrs. Kelly, I’m Detective Beckett,” he introduces, taking a seat across from her.

“Ready?” Martinez asks, poking his head into the room I’m standing in with Marshall and two other detectives. I jerk up my chin and follow him. When we enter the interrogation room Kelly is in, he sits back in his chair, crossing his arms over his chest.

Instantly on guard.

“Sorry for the wait,” I say, taking a seat across from him while Martinez stands.

“What’s this about?” he asks looking between us.

“We just have some questions for you, regarding the murder of Anna Cole and Grace Chambers.”

“Okay,” he says as Martinez places the folder he’s holding onto the table.

“The night the girls were murdered, they were in Nashville.” I tell him something he knows since he was helping to investigate the murder, or pretending to which is one of the reasons the case was stalled.

“Yeah, I know. I saw the video footage from the parking garage.”

“That night, you performed at Boot’s. Is that right?”

He swallows. “Yes.”

“Can you tell me what you did after that?” I ask, jotting down that he played at the bar next door to the one the girls were at that night, confirming the list of performers with dates sent to us was accurate.

“I went home.”

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