Page 63 of The Voices are Back

“I think that was my choice to tell her that or not tell her that,” I heard Aodhan say, anger clear in his voice.

I turned to find him standing in the doorway, looking as if he would explode at any second.

“Not to mention, it’d have been really fuckin’ nice to be able to stay in bed today, sleep in, and catch up on all the good REM sleep I’ve missed lately,” he said. “If you were here, you could’ve easily taken him.”

“But how would I have told her that I all but manipulated you into having a child with me?” Danyetta asked with all seriousness.

“What?” I asked.

That definitely hadn’t been mentioned.

“You didn’t manipulate me,” he groaned.

“I did.” She rolled her eyes. “We were friends. We’d been friends for a while. And I slowly whittled him down, day by day, until he said yes to the baby thing.”

Aodhan blinked. “You told her that?”

“Were you going to?” she asked.

Aodhan’s mouth shut tight.

No, he wasn’t going to tell me.

“Bowie won’t find out,” she said as if this was an old argument. “And I told you to call her years ago, before anything went down at the hospital with those nurses. The worst of which has moved back to town now that he’s out of prison.”

“I know,” Aodhan grumbled. “I already got surveillance on his house.”

“Good,” she said. “I know that he’s not allowed within a certain number of feet of us thanks to that restraining order that was granted, but I’m not fully confident that he won’t try to start something with us.”

“The guy got released?” I questioned.

Damn, I felt like I had whiplash. Their topics of conversation were everywhere.

“He got out weeks ago but finally made his way back here,” Aodhan answered. “We were hoping that he wouldn’t, since there were so many of his victims in this area. But we’re fairly sure that he’s moving back just to fuck with us. He knows that he has a lot of unhappy families here.”

From what I understood, Bowie, Danyetta and Aodhan had been the lucky ones. They’d found out very fast what had happened. They hadn’t taken an infant that wasn’t theirs home. They hadn’t bonded with another infant that wasn’t their baby. They hadn’t raised them and molded them into who they wanted them to be.

But other families had.

Lots of them.

And lots of them were very angry still.

A news special had just come on last week talking about the man going to prison—and now he was getting out?—and what the families were doing now.

Four of them were living in the same neighborhood, and they shared custody of their kids. How did you take a child away from the only person they knew? That’s right. You didn’t.

That was like a punch right to the gut.

“We only thought the hospital broke protocol with us, didn’t we?” I winced.

Aodhan smiled.

“Funny how fate works out, isn’t it?” he asked.

A big, brawny man like Aodhan talking about fate? That was like a soothing balm to my ragged soul.

“Yeah,” I said softly. “Funny.”

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