Page 10 of The Perfect Poise

"No, because he knew he was going to get punished and worried we were going to send him away to live with my sister. He hates her, so we sometimes threaten him with that. I guess he took it more seriously than we expected."

“I’m sorry,” Jessie said, even as she felt Ryan tug at her shirt.

“Maybe you can commiserate later?” he suggested. “We’ve got to talk to a witness.”

“Go ahead,” Karen said. “And don’t worry about me. That’s what my therapist is for.”

Jessie and Ryan left the other detectives and headed down the hall to the elevator.

“We weren’t in that much of a rush,” Jessie said while they waited for it to arrive. “Why did you want to get out of there so quick?”

Ryan glanced over his shoulder.

“Too many ears here,” he said. “I’ll tell you when we’re out of here.”

CHAPTER FIVE

They were halfway through breakfast at Swingers Diner on Beverly Blvd. when Jessie found that she couldn’t contain herself any longer.

She'd been turning over what Ryan had said in her head for fifteen minutes now, and she knew that if she didn't get her feelings off her chest, it would mess up their whole dynamic for the day.

“I have to tell you something and you have to promise not to get defensive about it,” she said after swallowing a bite of her breakfast egg sandwich.

“This sounds ominous,” he replied before taking a chomp out of his pancake.

“Do you remember what you said about Karen’s son, Calvin, when we left the station earlier?”

“Uh-huh.”

“About how you didn’t want to stay and hear about him biting the babysitter because it made you uncomfortable?” she said.

“I remember.”

“And you told me that was because, when Karen and I went to the restroom at dinner last night, Mickey told you how Calvin had seen Karen put her weapon in her gun safe and later on got a hammer and tried to smash the safe open so he could get to the gun?”

“Jessie, that conversation was a half hour ago,” he replied. “You don’t need to recount it for me. I’m the one who told you.”

“So you also recall saying that listening to more horror stories about their kid was too depressing at that hour of the morning.”

“I do recall that,” Ryan assured her before taking another bite of pancake.

Jessie shook her head in disbelief.

“Don’t you see the irony in that?”

Ryan, whose mouth was full, shook his head that he did not.

“Okay,” she said, aware that she was opening a can of worms. “You haven’t brought this up in a while, which I appreciate, but I assume that you still want to have children, right?”

“Very much so,” he answered.

The topic was a major bone of contention, one they’d agreed to set aside for the time being. Ryan was enthusiastic about the idea of having kids. Jessie, who had experienced personal trauma as a child as well as a miscarriage caused by her unhinged ex-husband several years ago, was far more circumspect about the prospect. Ryan had, for the time being at least, deferred to her desire to hold off for now, if not forever.

“But Ryan,” she said, unable to keep a hint of condescension out of her voice, “you do know that children grow up? They don’t stay cute, little babies. They eventually become five-year-olds with issues of their own who send babysitters to urgent care and try to smash a safe so they can get to a gun.”

“The thought has occurred to me,” he conceded.

“And yet, when a friend and colleague of ours reaches out about the challenges she’s facing with her young son, you couldn’t get away from the situation fast enough. Can you see how that might give me pause? How I might wonder how you’d respond if our theoretical future child had some kind of emotional problem that was hard to navigate?”

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