Page 12 of Sinful Sorrow

“But it’s not kindergarten for you, right? Haunted houses are creepy if you’re not into them.”

“Right.” He swipes tissues under his nose, then up to clean beneath his eyes. “Naomi’s been super tired the last few months. We thought she’d come down with something pretty nasty, because she was vomiting and sleeping. Vomiting and sleeping. That was her whole personality since, like…” He swallows and searches his mind. “July, I guess. We know, now, that she was pregnant. But we didn’t…” He shakes his head. “We didn’t know back then. So when she started feeling better a few weeks ago, we were all super relieved. Then we tested, and everything came up the way it did. Then October arrived, and since Naomi’s energy levels had come back to normal, Kallie and Brent were on us to stick with tradition.”

“So Naomi agreed to the haunted house,” Fletch inserts. “She hates it. But she did it.”

“Every single year,” he whimpers, dropping his head into his hands and scrubbing his nails through short hair. “It was just a normal night. We’ve done the haunted house every single year since middle school.”

“How did you feel about the pregnancy, Mason?” I sit forward in my seat and rest my elbows on the table between us. “Were you mad?”

“Don’t do that, Detective.” The lawyer lifts a brow, challenging me with a sharp tap of her fingernails against the laminate tabletop. “My client has generously elected to answer your questions to help your search for whoever hurt Naomi. He is not a suspect. Don’t make me end this interview and shut you out.”

“I’m just trying to understand how everyone felt about things.” I bring my attention back to Mason and study his red-rimmed eyes. “You’re eighteen. She’s eighteen. You both graduated high school right around the time she conceived that baby. Spent the summer hanging out. Preparing for college. You had big things coming your way. A baby is an unexpected wrench in otherwise perfect plans.”

“Naomi’s life was the one that would be affected most.” He sniffles, sucking a long line of snot back up into his nose. “I know it sounds lame, but it’s fact. She was the one who was carrying the baby. She’s the one who would work her butt off to maintain her GPA in class. And in the end, she was the one who would give birth and take care of the baby the most.”

“You didn’t plan on being an active parent?”

“I did. I would have done everything I could. But it’s no secret women are still a baby’s primary attachment. And I’m in college to play ball. Classes. Practice. The gym. It all adds up, so even if I plan to do my best, it doesn’t take an unaware jackass to know how things would have turned out. Naomi would have carried most of the load. We already talked about it, Detective.”

“You talked about how you’d leave the child-rearing to her?” Fletch presses. “And she was okay with it?”

“You’re twisting it up!” He slaps his hand to the table. But fresh tears fall, too. Sorrow, eating the man up and making him weak. “I was going to be a good dad! I was going to do way better than my father ever did.”

“Mason,” the lawyer grumbles, placing her hand on his forearm and eying him.

“I’m not saying mine is crap.” He shakes her hand off. “He worked hard to build everything we have. But the reality is, my mom did most of the kid stuff. I would’ve worked hard on the court, gotten drafted to the NBA, and I would’ve done everything I could to take care of my family.”

“But absent,” I clarify, “while Naomi raised the child?”

“I was gonna be there! We were gonna live off campus, together. So I could be there every single night. I would be with them, day after day, taking care of the things I could. I’m just trying to explain that, despite all my best efforts and plans, we were realistic enough to acknowledge it still would have been her who was studying while nursing a baby. It would have been her turning up to class on little sleep. Short of giving the baby up or having a nanny raise it, this would have been unavoidable.”

“A nanny?” Fletch steps back to rest against the wall, setting his hands behind his back and his left foot against the brickwork. “Naomi was attending Copeland U on an academic scholarship, Mason. Her family isn’t rolling in cash. Nannies cost money.”

“My family has money,” he groans, rolling his head side to side as exhaustion competes with trauma and devastation. “My mom offered to help. And my dad offered money. They wanted us to get the best education we could.”

“And you didn’t accept?” I ask in disbelief. “You didn’t want it?”

“We didn’t have time to fully think it through. Naomi and I wanted to be active, present parents. We shared the same belief that we would do the work between us. That doesn’t mean we would completely refuse all help. But we knew we wanted to raise our baby together. We knew, when we came out the other side, successful, married, and happy, we could say we did it ourselves. These were ongoing discussions we’d been having with our parents over the last few weeks. We would have continued this discussion this weekend, when we had time to breathe, especially now that she’s practically halfway. But then we went to the stupid haunted house, and…”

He breaks down. His shoulders crumble and his chest caves in. Wracking sobs burst from the depths of his lungs and tears pour from his eyes. “This can’t be real, right?” He looks desperately at the lawyer. “She can’t really be gone. It’s a cruel joke and part of the Halloween shit we hate so much.”

“Let’s take a break.” I grab the recorder from the end of the table and hover my finger over the button that’ll switch it off. “Detective Archer Malone. Detective Charlie Fletcher. We’re ending this interview at twelve-twelve, October fourteenth. And we’ll pick it up again in the morning.” Hitting the button and dropping the device back on the table, I wait for Mason to calm. For his tears to slow and his shoulders to still.

Then when he looks up, I try to muster a small, sympathetic smile.

“You made big plans for the future. And someone took those away from you.”

“It’s not fair,” he cries. Red in the face and splotchy from tears. “She was kind to everybody, Detective. She worked hard and studied harder. She was intent on escaping poverty, and she gave the things she did have to those she thought needed them more. I was going to marry her,” he whimpers. “And that had nothing to do with the baby. It wasn’t a shotgun situation where I felt I needed to do the right thing. I’ve loved her since I was six years old. And now she’s…” He drops his head and trembles. “She’s not supposed to be gone. Not like this.”

“Well that fucking sucked.” I leave the interview room ahead of Fletch and stride to our war room instead. Already, our whiteboard is up. Pictures are tacked to the wall, and lines are being drawn. Relationships. Parents, who were becoming grandparents. Siblings who were becoming uncles and aunties. Friends. Best friends. And possibly the most important relationship of all—besides the one between Naomi and her killer—was the one between Naomi and her boyfriend.

He was the father of her baby.

He was with her when she died.

He held her while she took her last breaths.

And he lawyered up faster than it took me to pour a cup of coffee.

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