Page 305 of As The Shifter World Turns

Martin opened his mouth as if to rebut and then closed it again.

“Were we supposed to have grown up time?” Ryder asked with a forced chuckle. “I didn’t come prepared for that.”

Toby rolled his eyes again and this time gathered the kids.

It was fun to watch them playing like that. You could see the shifter in them the way they pounced as if hunting prey.

“We really do have grown up things to talk about,” Archer started. And that was for the best, because this really was about him first and foremost. At least, I assumed he was wanting to talk about his arrest.

“No one thinks you did it,” Ryder said and the rest of us all piped up in agreement.

“I didn’t think you did. But you aren’t the people we have to convince. Mylawyer says it doesn’t look good, so I need to come up with a Plan B.” He twisted off the top of his soda and took a long swig.

“I was thinking about that, too,” I confessed.

“I don’t want my mate to be alone raising the kids. I was thinking maybe we could buy a big house for all of you to live in and be a huge extended family.”

His words shocked me. It was like he had given up already. “We kind of have that now at Sunshine Manor and the two other houses. You know? We’re already kind of a pack.”

Archer’s words stunned us all into silence, including Micah.

It broke me to see him so unable to see the possible light at the end of the road.

“I have half an idea.” I finally said when the prolonged silence was too much. “It’s not great but together we could work on it.”

That had everyone’s attention.

“The security footage stunk. We know this and there’s nothing we can do to make it better.” It wasn't like on the crime shows where they can miraculously take some random corrupted film from a mile away and make it clear enough to see an odd tooth they use to match dental records or what not. This was real life and shitty footage was shitty footage.

“It does show someone taller than Archer though,” Ivor noted.

“True but my lawyer said I could’ve been sitting on a pillow and that it means nothing.”

It blew my mind how horrible this entire system was. So much for the innocent until proven guilty crap they taught us in school. It was more like guilty if it was easier than trying to look for the real answer.

“What if we get better cameras and motion detecting lights? And position them in a different way than we have at the moment?” Said like that, it sounded so dumb.

“And how does that help?”Archer asked with no snideness to his tone. “He already did it.”

“Or she,” Ivor added. “We don’t know.”

“They brought back the car,” I said. “If they were a random person, the car would have been in the river or stashed in the woods, not parked exactly as you had it before.”

“And you think they’ll be back?” Micah pushed himself up to be fully seated.

Neil rubbed his chin. “Perhaps we could do like a stake out instead.”

Toby called Martin over, something about poop, while the rest of us tried to form a decent strategy. By the time those of us who planned to shift took our fur, we had a tentative plan ready to go. It might not work, but at least we felt like we were doing something and we needed to not feel so helpless.

Daire spoke close to my ear as the Sunshine Manor crew was cleaning up from our picnic. “There was a dark cloud over us and now… now there’s a glimpse of the sun.”

“I love you, Daire.”

“As I love you, Nate.”

It took us a week of watching and filming and crossing our fingers the person would return to the scene of the crime. I was pretty sure Archer lost a few years of his life with all the worry he had, not for himself, but for his mate and his children. The weight piled on him because some asshat decided to take his car was unforgivable.

But somehow Archer did forgive, when we caught a teenager, Mike, from around the corner coming back for the car. The kid had been using it to get to work. His grandfather, the one who was raising him, had been suffering with high blood pressure, and they needed the money for rent. What he didn’t have money for was a car and working the nightshift meant the public transportation wasn’t running.

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