Page 21 of Complicated Past

“Did you want to go to the drive-thru someplace?”

“It should be fine going in to eat. Is Panera okay?”

“Perfect. I never get tired of eating there.”

For once, he’d guessed right. They ordered at the counter and got their beverages. When he placed his hand on her arm to steer her away from a table in the center of the room, she flinched and pulled her arm away.

“Sorry. I was just going to say let’s sit there.” He pointed to a vacant booth in the back of the dining room.

“It’s okay.” She licked her lips.

No, it wasn’t okay. A person didn’t react that way to an innocent touch without a reason. Bri was proof of that.

He took a seat facing Kendra’s appealing face and the restaurant’s interior. Despite the astronomically remote chance of Regina’s abductor walking in, Linc’s gaze swept over the diners and to the door with each new arrival as they waited for their food. “I’m sorry you got dragged into this.”

“It’s not your fault. You had no way of knowing. None of us did. It’s Bri and Regina that I’m worried about. And Jalen,” she added.

“Level with me. If something happens and Bri doesn’t make it back here, what are my chances of being given custody?”

“I can’t say for certain. There’s an excellent chance if she named you as custodian in a legal document. I know you haveto have a family care plan for deployments, but Jalen’s going to have to continue in therapy for a few years. If Regina is found, at her age, it’s not likely she can provide the level of care he needs. If you don’t have other family as backup, you’d have to consider who could handle that kind of commitment. That can be a lot for someone to take on. It isn’t ideal for Jalen to be placed with a family he doesn’t know either,” she cautioned. “If you were in a position that didn’t deploy or got out of the military, that would change things.”

“What other options are there?” He hated to ask.

“He could go into foster care. He’s young. There are families he could be placed with who are looking to adopt. Just this week, I met with a couple?—”

“No. I wouldn’t have a say on who. They may not allow me to stay a part of his life. Or they could move. Jalen might think I’d abandoned him.” That he wasn’t worth sticking around for.

“You could ask someone you know to adopt him.”

Except Linc didn’t know who he could ask. That left him one option: get Bri home safely. If he failed, it might be the end of his time on the Bad Karma team or in the Army.

Half an hourafter they had resumed their search, Kendra sighed and angled to face him in the car. “So, after your mother died in the car accident, Bri went to live with her grandmother, but you went into foster care?”

“Yep.” Memories of Regina driving away with Bri resurrected that sick to his stomach, helpless feeling. “Bri and I wanted to stay together; however, our social worker said it would be difficult to place us together.”

“And Mrs. Feldman wouldn’t take you?”

“I wasn’t her blood. She was certain I’d be a bad influence. Steal or get involved in drugs because I was a Black teenager. Never mind that was her white son’s MO, and she let Bri go down that same path as her son and our mom.” But for different reasons.

“Yet, we’re out here looking for her.” Kendra scanned the cars on her side of the street.

“I’m doing it for Bri. And for Jalen.”

“I’m guessing foster care wasn’t the best experience.”

“It wasn’t that much worse than home. At least there was food. They encouraged me to do my schoolwork. I only got roughed up by the older boys in the first of the three group homes I was placed in.” He didn’t expect someone to adopt him, but there’d been no love. No feeling like he had worth. He couldn’t put Jalen in a situation like that.

“The other kids beat you up?”

“I was smaller than them, and I wasn’t black enough for my foster brothers.” Just like he wasn’t white enough for Regina. His Bad Karma teammates didn’t care about his skin color. “You probably understand what it’s like. People askingwhat you are.You’re multiracial is my guess.” And beautifully so.

“I do get asked that a lot. Usually, it’s curiosity since people like to put you in a category. Black, White, and Korean mix is not all that common.” She smiled as she said it. “Both my parents are bi-racial, so I’m second generation, and they helped navigate the uncomfortable questions and prejudices they knew would come up.”

“That would have been helpful.” He didn’t mean to say that out loud. “Bri saw some of it with me as her brother, but seeing it isn’t the same as experiencing it.”

“People have different experiences being mixed-race. You being raised by your white mother with your white sibling wasdifferent than my father being a Black Asian raised by a middle-class white family?—”

“What?”

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