Page 88 of The System

“What do you need right now?” Carina asked as she pushed Kieran’s hair back out of her face.

“I don’t know.” Kieran wiped tears from her cheeks. “She’s guilty, isn’t she?”

Carina moved into her and wrapped her up in a hug.

“I’m going to call in at work today.”

“You can’t do that,” Kieran replied.

“Yes, I can. I’m not going anywhere, Kieran.” Carina kissed her temple. “We’ll figure this out, okay?”

CHAPTER 26

“You’re going to get in trouble,” Kieran noted.

“For accompanying the woman I’m dating to the county jail to visit her sister?” Carina replied. “I can’t see how that would get me in trouble.”

“Just the dating part could. And are we dating? We’ve had one date that got ruined this morning.”

“How did it get ruined, exactly?”

“Well, this morning, you woke up to a phone call about how my sister is, apparently, the worst kind of person who lied to me and maybe killed two people. You took a sick day, which you’ve told me you never do, and on that sick day, I make you come here.”

“You didn’t make me do anything, Kieran. I want to be here for you. I’ll wait out here or go in with you, if you want, but I should probably just stay out here because if they know I was in there when she said something she shouldn’t, they might try to call me as a witness or something, now that it seems like she’s going to trial.” She took Kieran’s hand. “And yes, we are dating; present tense. Not one date and done. Going on another one soon.”

“Soon?”

“I know this is complicated because of your sister and how we met, but maybe what you need is something to look forward to at the end of every day so that you don’t have to think about this all the time. I can be that for you, maybe.”

“You already are,” Kieran replied, turning toward her in the uncomfortable chairs. “But you’ve been doing that since we met. I can’t explain it – and, trust me, I’ve tried to – but you’ve always felt like someone special to me, even when I didn’t know that it could mean this.” She squeezed Carina’s hand.

“Kieran Hart,” the guard behind the counter said.

“Kieran,” Kieran said loudly. “Kieran is fine.”

Carina smiled at her, leaned in, and kissed her on the cheek.

“I’ll be right out here when you’re done, okay? We can go to dinner after this, if you want.”

“Yeah, okay,” she said and stood. “Let’s see how this goes first. I might be bad company after I’m done talking to her.”

“I’m still not going anywhere,” Carina replied.

Kieran leaned down then and kissed her on the lips, needing to feel hers pressed to Carina’s. A cheek kiss was nice, but she was beginning to understand what having someone to kiss goodbye and hello really meant. Diego hadn’t ever been a big kisser when he’d gotten home from work. He’d mostly asked about dinner and disappeared into his office. As she grabbed her badge from the guard, she realized that she’d gone days without kissing him while they were together and several times, too, over the years. She didn’t want to go several days without kissing Carina.

“Hey, Picket Fence. What’s up?” Marin said when Kieran was brought into the room. “My attorney with you this time?”

“No, it’s just me,” Kieran replied and sat down in her usual chair across from Marin.

“Okay. So, is this a sister visit, or are you still going to try to insist I get someone else? Frank seems decent to me. I mean, he’s a little awkward, but he’s fine. I’m the one who didn’t want the deal, so don’t blame him because they took it off the table.”

“You know about that?”

“Yeah, they told me. I guess a guard was in court this morning, and someone else was talking about my case. He hates me, so he bragged that he heard they’d removed the deal as an option.”

“Why does a guard hate you?”

“He hates everyone in here. In his mind, there’s no innocent until proven guilty. We’re just all guilty because we got arrested.”

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