Page 60 of Love Me Fierce

Giving out student contact information to anyone not authorized would get her fired. Would she be that stupid? I shake my head because I know the answer. Yes. I add this little chore to my ever-growing to-do list.

“She’s in jail again, isn’t she?” Logan asks.

“Yeah.”

He gives a tortured groan, his face twisting in the kind of agony that shreds my soul. “I hate it. Some of the other kids know.”

“I’m sorry.”

His expression hardens. Is this the source of the anger that got him fighting a pair of eight graders?

I make eye contact with him. “Tell me what you’re feeling right now.”

“Mad.” He huffs another half-sigh, half-groan. “Why can’t she just quit? Why can’t she be normal?”

In other words, betrayed. Abandoned. “It hurts. I know.”

He huffs another sigh and focuses on the window again.

I’ve given him the clinical explanation of why it’s not easy for Teresa to stay out of trouble, but I don’t think Logan’s ready for empathy. Truthfully, I’m not either, but I can pretend when I need to.

I pull into our driveway and coast to a stop in front of our gate. The porch light flicks on, bathing the front of the house with a welcoming glow.

Logan steps out of the car, dragging his backpack from the seat with him.

I meet him at the front of the car and draw him into a hug. He hugs me back with a pathetic squeeze but at least he’s letting me try.

“I don’t want to see her again,” he says.

I step back and lock eyes with him. “Understood.”

We step through the gate and climb the steps. “What name would you pick, if you were going to change it?”

“Something one syllable, like Fox, or Cade.”

My breath tightens in my throat. If he’s serious, I’m going to need to figure out how to be supportive. But what’s coming up right now is something heavy, and complicated. Like grief.

Single parenting is not for the weak, that’s for sure. One minute I think I have a handle on things, and the next, here comes a curveball.

“Do we still have time to read tonight?” Logan asks when we shuffle inside the house.

“Depends on how fast you can get ready for bed,” I reply, toeing off my boots in our small entryway. Last night, the story’s hero, a thirteen-year-old boy named Brian who is the only survivor in a plane crash in the Canadian wilderness, was about to face off with a bear.

“Five minutes.” He sets his backpack in the adjoining living room.

“Make it three.”

He dashes up the stairs and disappears into the bathroom, giving me time to carry Marin and Michelle’s murder books into my tiny office at the back of the house.

Though I need to catch up to Logan, I open Michelle’s binder. The crime scene chrono—a list of every step of the investigation, starting with the time she was first reported missing—stares back at me. The questions I put aside when I left the station earlier begin to unfurl one after the other.

How can this new discovery of the pendant help us bring in her killer?

After reading and tucking Logan in, I return back to the office, but instead of tackling another run-through of Michelle’s case files, I pull up the notes I took from interviewing Vivian’s neighbors instead. So far, I am getting nowhere with the investigation.

Her neighbors are mostly elderly folks, though there are twosisters living in a double unit in the first row, both in their fifties, and a thirty-four-year-old female and her toddler in the back corner unit. Vivian’s closest neighbor is hearing impaired. Ted Graham noticed her door ajar, but nothing else of use. I haven’t been able to talk with the woman who lives across from Vivian, Beverly Ovenell. Apparently she’s having some sort of medical procedure done in Boise and isn’t due back until Monday, so it’s entirely possible my interview will be irrelevant because nobody seems to know when she left. Still nothing from our crime scene team. If they don’t find prints that aren’t Vivian’s or Matty’s, I’m going to hit a wall.

Vivian said her source in L.A. is rock-solid. So, if Kent didn’t turn her place upside down, who did?

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