Page 42 of Baby Me

“Maybe it was Kim, looking out for your daughter and making sure she didn’t suffer the same fate.”

Tripp choked back a sob at that. “Fuck, Vina.” The words were whispered into my hair as he pulled me closer. “That’s just what she’d do, too.” He paused a minute and then cocked his head to the side. “Wait, why did you say that?”

“Say what?”

“The bit about Kim saving Coral from the same fate.”

“I don’t know. It was part of what woke me up. That feeling like, ‘It’s happening again.’”

Tripp pulled me into his arms and held me tightly as he explained the part he had left out earlier, that the new theory everyone had was that June was responsible for the fire that killed his wife.

“We’ll get justice for her.”

“We’re not one hundred percent certain it was June,” he admitted.

“After seeing that woman, and the way she looked at our daughter, I have no doubt about it. She was going to take our baby from us. Anyone who could do that to a child could easily do that to a woman she thought stole her life out from under her.”

“Fuck,” Tripp hissed again. “Kim called me the day she died and told me she had a weird feeling. She was worried about me; afraid I’d been harmed or something. All along, Kim was probably feeling what was coming for her that day. I should have gone home to her when she told me she felt like something was off. If I had, maybe I could have saved her.”

“Tripp,” I whispered and then leaned in and gently pulled his face down toward me. My hands rested on his bearded cheeks as I did so and I stroked over them gently, to ease the tension built in his shoulders. “You couldn’t have known. I don’t think anyone would ever expect for a person to behave the way your ex-girlfriend has. It’s something straight out of Hollywood, not the reality most of us face.”

“That’s no excuse. My wife called me because she felt off and needed me to be there for her, to offer comfort and I stayed at work while she was murdered by someone that did it because of me.”

“And none of that is your fault. Not even the part where you didn’t go home. It wasn’t something you normally would have done, right?” He shook his head slightly. “Kim never asked you to come home, did she?”

“No.”

“Okay then. You didn’t let her down because you couldn’t have known. That is what makes hindsight a bitch. Please, stop torturing yourself about what might have been because it isn’t possible to go back and change anything. You need to pull your focus back to the present. Your children are your number one priority.”

“The club just went on lockdown today.”

“Well, that’s good. Star and Kip will be at the clubhouse, so you won’t have to worry about them.”

“I will be here with you and Coral. If, for some reason, I can’t be here with you, one of my trusted brothers will be in this room and another outside that door until that bitch is caught.”

There was a quick knock on the door then and the nurse opened up without waiting for us to tell her she could. “Sorry for the intrusion, but I wanted to give you an update. It seems that a nurse named Anna was the one whose badge was scanned into one of the med drawers. She isn’t a nurse on this wing.”

“It wasn’t her,” Tripp stated.

“I’m sorry, how do you know that?”

“I was talking to her about the same time that the fake nurse must have been in this room. Anna is the cousin of the woman whose photo has been passed around the floor. Her cousin June might have gained access to Anna’s badge. Go find her. She works on the second floor, but her uncle is also a patient in the critical care unit on the fourth floor, so she might be there visiting. Find out if she’s missing her badge.”

“I will go let security know what you had to say. Could you tell me the exact time, and where in the hospital, you saw Anna? It might be helpful in tracing her steps forward and back to see where she might have come into contact with this other woman, or where her badge went missing.”

“Sure, it was about twenty minutes before I showed up here and down in the hallway just off the cafeteria.”

No sooner did the nurse leave the room than Tripp was on the phone. He called Scout and told her to work her magic and snag the hospital’s security footage before anyone else could fuck with it. I had to admire my man. Shit. He wasn’t really my man. Maybe in another reality. Tripp was just being nice to me because of the problems with our daughter and now June. He had vowed to take care of me, but I wasn’t delusional enough to think it meant he wanted to be with me too. He had his reasons for not wanting more than one night, despite whatever crush he claimed to have on me before. Those reasons hadn’t gone away.

Chapter 19

Tripp

It didn’t take long for Scout to gain access to the security footage and back it up on her own server. Then, she started pouring through the footage until she found where June entered my daughter’s room and when she all but ran out of it about ten minutes later.

“Ten minutes.” I growled into the phone. “That bitch had ten whole fucking minutes in this room with my daughter and my woman asleep and not knowing it. If she wasn’t slow and sloppy for whatever reason, she could have taken them both out before anyone could do anything about it.”

“They won’t be left alone again,” Scout asserted.

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