Page 89 of Without You, Scotch and Sammy 2

“She was in the city,” I murmur. I look up to them. “She told me she left her folks and went to school. She was alone.”

“Old man Ricardo was bitching about how he was gonna take Dad’s job away, because we were ‘harboring his daughter’ – even though we weren’t.”

“He said how he was gonna have you charged, and then the state would have me and Kari removed from your house,” Marc spits out. “How Kari would be thrown into the system and taken away from me.”

I scrub a hand through my hair. “Yeah, she told me all this already.”

“She left because her daddy was gonna have you charged, and yet you got mad at her!” Marc storms closer to me. “She left to protect my sister, and you let me shit on her this last month? What the fuck is the matter with you?”

“It doesn’t matter anymore. He couldn’t actually have me charged. The law was on my side.”

“But she didn’t know that! We were kids and she thought she was falling on her sword for us. For me!”

We all look up as the door crashes open again, then Luc and Kari run in with a piece of paper in their hands. Luc’s smile is huge, and Kari’s face is flushed. “She miscarried!”

The knife twists in my belly. “Who did?”

“Soda!”

“Why the hell are you smiling like that while saying those words?”

“Because she didn’t abort!” Luc says loudly. “She didn’t abort. She lost the baby that night.”

Marc turns back to me with unconcealed rage in his eyes. “She miscarried. She lost her baby, she protected us, she was all alone, and we all shit on her!”

He turns on his heels to leave, but I jump forward and grab his shoulder. “Where are you going?”

“To ask Sammy to marry me. Someone needs to step up and do the right thing by that girl.”

“Stop.” I turn and snatch the paper from Luc’s hand. “I don’t even wanna know where you got this.”

“Don’t even ask,” Kari giggles. “We’ll both probably lose our jobs if we answer.”

“And maybe there’d be prison time, too,” Luc adds with a smile. He and Kari share conspiratorial grins, but my hands shake as I read the same sheet of paper that I had access to at our mediator meeting. She already told me this.

“This says spontaneous abortion…”

Luc rolls his eyes. “That’s med talk for miscarriage. She didn’t walk into the hospital that night to abort her baby.”

“But she admitted on the phone that night.”

“What were her words exactly?”

I shrug my shoulders. “I dunno. It was so long ago. Ricardo had just finished telling me he took care of it. Then she said the baby is gone and she’s sorry.”

“‘The baby is gone’ isn’t the same as ‘I aborted,’” Oz points out obviously. “And when your daddy decked hers, he didn’t seem like the kinda guy who got his way with anything.”

“Did Dad really hit him?”

They both nod.

“We saw it,” Oz says. “He came into the station. X and I both still had tags and pleats in our new uniforms. He came in threatening you, threatening your dad, threatening Macchio. Threatening Sammy, even. Your old man smacked him down then went and iced his knuckles. Ricardo bitched about assault, but there wasn’t a single damn cop in that place who knew what he was talking about. We didn’t see a thing.”

“Why didn’t you guys tell me this?”

“Nothing had changed,” X says. “Except Ricardo wasn’t happy. You were deep in the hole. We weren’t gonna bring it up just to remind you.”

“This is why she’s not taking my calls anymore. This is why she signed the divorce papers.”

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