Page 57 of Hidden While In Sight

Diego thought of Ramiro’s secretary. “Unless…”

“Don’t,” Ramiro warned. “Did you even have shit to share about your job? Or did you just call to fuck with me?”

“Oh, right.” Diego swung back to the monitor, tapping the one that showed the kid’s room, which still looked all neat and tidy. “The information your guys gathered didn’t say shit about his kid. No marriage or anything either. Did he knock someone up or something?”

“Kid? What kid?”

“There’s a room all set up. Looks like it’s for a boy.” Diego remembered Emma loved dinosaurs and reconsidered. “Well, I don’t know really. No kid has visited, and no kid showed up in the data pulled, so it bugged me.”

He swiveled his chair back toward the hallway. Hannah’s children should be waking up from their naps soon. He liked when Emma napped on his chest instead of her bed better.

The sliding glass door was partially open. Not even halfway. Really, he tried convincing himself, it was too small for even a child to fit through. The hairs along Diego’s arms rose, and he stood up from the chair.

He’d startled Hannah. Maybe the latch just hadn’t caught. It was fine.

The hairs on his arms didn’t say it was fine. He crossed to the glass.

“Diego?” Ramiro said impatiently in his ear. “I said, I don’t think there’s any kid.”

Diego wasn’t listening. At the edge of the pool, little Emma teetered once, then fell.

His phone hit the floor, and he hit the water a second later. The world dimmed as he grabbed Emma, pushing with all his might in his panic, making her fly up and out of the water before his body could shut down. Before his memories could drag him under.

Then he started to sink.

A muffled crying drummed in his ears, coming from above the waterline. If she was crying, she was breathing. She was fine, he told himself. She wasn’t in the water, not that he saw, but he wasn’t seeing anything anymore.

His own lungs filled with water. No. That couldn’t happen to Emma.

Then it was Diego’s mother crying, and harsh, unyielding hands, holding him down, wanting to kill him.

And there was darkness, which was soon replaced by the dead, staring eyes of his mother, a trickle of blood running between them. Despite the way his mind fought them off, flashes of Hannah’s face tried to replace it. The way her face would have looked if he’d been too late, that night with Ashford. Or the way it did look. Suddenly he was confused. Had he been too late?

When his mind showed him Emma’s face instead, her eyes lacking their usual light, he heaved water from his lungs and onto the concrete beneath his shaking and soaked body.

Gentle hands rubbed his back.

“Emma?” he croaked, coughing up more water. “Emma okay?”

“She’s fine, Diego,” Hannah told him, though her voice sounded as strangled as his. “She didn’t drown. She’s alive.”

The warmth of a little body wrapped around his arm, little fingers clinging, and Emma’s sobbing, hiccupping cries sank into his senses.

Diego tried to focus, but the darkness was sucking at him, angry that he hadn’t drowned. Telling him he should have been dead all along.

He managed to stroke his hand over Emma’s hair, but it was still wet, not the soft, silky cap he was used to. The wet texture added to the sense of claws sinking into him, trying to drag him away.

“Love you,” he mumbled, wanting to stay, but he never could fight that punishing grip as it pushed him farther and farther into the water, into the dark.

His mother’s dead eyes were waiting for him, but they no longer flickered to become anyone else’s. That was because he hadn’t failed. He hadn’t failed like his mother had.

Chapter 24

Diego woke up with his body feeling like ice—all but his hand, which was wrapped in warmth.

He was confused to find himself in bed. Hadn’t he collapsed near the pool? How the hell had Hannah carried him all the way to a bed?

It was her hand gripping his, making it feel so warm.

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