Page 92 of A Life Imagined
“No,” Rayan replied, turning to the man beside him.“It’s ours.”
Epilogue
OTTAWA
“I’d like you to run the names again then get the results to legal,” Frances said into the phone, swiveling in her chair to look at the rain sliding down the window.From her office on the fifth floor of the RCMP Headquarters Building, she could see out across the Rideau River.“That’s right.They’ll take it from there.”
She hung up and began gathering the printouts for her next meeting.There was a knock at the door.
“Come in,” Frances said.
It was Sergeant Ellen Ling, a promising young officer that Frances had selected to work under her when she first transferred divisions.“I have your uniform for the ceremony on Friday, Superintendent.”
Technically, Frances was still Inspector until Friday, but she wasn’t about to quibble over the details.She shuffled the documents into a folder and got to her feet, tucking the folder under her arm.“Thank you, Sergeant.Just hang it by the door.”
But Ling hovered in place, her expression perplexed.“There’s just one thing.”
“And what’s that?”
“With all due respect, Superintendent,” Ling said hesitantly.“I don’t think it will fit.”
They both looked down at Frances’s protruding belly, well past remaining hidden behind the starched confines of her scarlet Mountie jacket.
“Right.”Sometimes Frances felt if it weren’t for the baby getting between her and her shoelaces each morning, she was in danger of forgetting it was there.
“There’s a maternity uniform I can request if you’d like,” Ling offered.“I wanted to check with you first.”
Frances understood the sergeant’s caution.She hadn’t been overly forthcoming about the pregnancy, waiting until she was clearly showing before mentioning anything at work.She’d been unable to get over the suspicion that it would set her back professionally—a fear that had so far proven unfounded.The agency had been almost irritatingly supportive.They have a maternity uniform, for Chrissakes.
Frances nodded.“Let’s go with that.”
In the end, her long-awaited promotion hadn’t come about from her closing a high-profile case but because of her dogged commitment to the job.After returning from Montreal, she’d requested a transfer out of Organized Crime and into the Professional Ethics Office.When a leadership opening came up a year later, Deputy Commissioner Gill had put her forward for the promotion.She’d received the confirmation exactly three weeks before her fortieth birthday and two months before her due date.
Working at the Ethics Office kept her in Ottawa full-time, so she was there for Diana and the kids—for every birthday party and dance recital.It made Frances feel grounded and gave her the space to take stock of what she wanted.And she wasn’t sure that still involved cornering criminals in abandoned warehouses.There was plenty of good policing she could do without having to take an axe to her personal life.
As an unintended consequence of being back in the city, she’d often found herself bumping into Ethan.It happened frequently enough that they started joking that maybe the universe was trying to tell them something.He and the vet hadn’t worked out, and he’d dropped a few hints about the hypothetical coffee date he had been trying to get Frances to commit to—something planned instead of their impromptu run-ins.Despite her misgivings—she didn’t want to fuck things up again—Frances finally relented.Coffee had progressed to work lunches, then movies and dinner, and before she knew it, she was spending several nights a week at his apartment.
Being with Ethan was like finding a missing piece of herself.She was a different person when she was with him, and she liked that version far better than the one without him.Things were easy between them, their shared history filling in all the awkward gaps.It was as though, having been to the brink and back, they’d seen the worst of each other without losing the love, and it frightened her to think how close she’d come to throwing that away.
She was the one who asked if he’d consider moving back in.When Ethan agreed, he said it was only because she needed the furniture.The last time around, she’d been the more ambivalent of the two, dragging her feet when Ethan brought up joint checking accounts and engagement rings.Now Frances knew what they had was worth fighting for.
If she had anyone to thank for that realization, it was Mathias fucking Beauvais.When the Montreal underground had unexpectedly imploded, she’d watched the developments with a mixture of shock and relief.She knew for certain that if Mathias had remained in Canada, he would be the one filling the power vacuum Giovanni Bianchi’s assassination had left behind, and she could only imagine what would have come from that.Forced to choose, she regarded Bianchi as the lesser of the two evils.
A part of her wondered if news of the family’s plight would compel him to crawl out of the woodwork, yet she’d heard nothing, not even rumors.It seemed the man had well and truly disappeared.For a while, after she’d returned to Ottawa, Frances had made a half-hearted attempt to track Mathias down.She’d felt like Captain Ahab, obsessed with the one that got away.And then, eventually, she’d given that up as well, finally conceding her win.
Once Sergeant Ling left, Frances stepped out of her office and headed down the hall to the conference room, where Inspector Dixon was waiting.They were meeting to discuss the handling of several of her cases while she was away.
“Allen,” Dixon announced when she walked into the room.“Must be looking forward to putting your feet up.”
“I can see why you’re in a rush to have me gone,” she retorted, pulling out a chair and taking a seat.“I manage to run circles around you even while growing a tiny human.Me going on leave makes you look better.”
Dixon laughed.“You know we’re all desperate to have you back.”
She and Ethan hadn’t exactly planned for it to happen, but they also hadn’t done anything to prevent it.She’d already made her peace with the fact that, biologically, kids were not in the cards for her, so it had come as quite a surprise when her body decided otherwise.Ethan was more than thrilled.Shortly after finding out, they’d been lying in bed one morning when he’d gently broached the subject of marriage.
“What if I proposed with the ring around a pacifier?”he teased, tucking a loose strand of hair behind her ear.“I call it double entrapment.”
Frances laughed and swatted his hand away.“I can’t decide which is more heinous, that or a shotgun wedding.”
They decided to wait until after the baby was born.That way, they could all be there, even if the kid was too young to remember.They would have a simple ceremony down at city hall, just their little family of three.Diana, of course, was devastated.Apparently, she’d been planning Frances’s wedding since the sixth grade.
It was a girl.But only Frances knew that.Not one to leave anything to chance, she’d insisted on finding out.Ethan had sworn her to secrecy.He’d already informed his boss of his plans to quit after the baby arrived and seemed unnervingly ready for life as a stay-at-home dad.He’d made her late for work twice already by serenading her belly with acoustic covers of his favorite Radiohead songs.
Sometimes his devotion to their unborn daughter made her nervous, not because she wasn’t convinced he would be a wonderful father but because it made her question whether she was equipped to be a mother.She’d never been particularly maternal or prone to sweeping emotion.Yet sometimes, when Frances was alone and felt the baby kick, she was struck by something indescribable—scary and beautiful at the same time.
She took that as a good sign.While she was a rookie when it came to most things about motherhood, she’d learned, in her years of police work, thatscarywas something she could handle.
