Page 60 of Make Me Love You

“Wait here,” he said, unbuckling.

Emma nodded. She watched Eli approach the vehicle right as another car went whizzing by them, making Eli jump farther off the road. Her heart leaped into her throat. She had known police work was sometimes dangerous, but it felt excruciatingly real now.

It felt like an eternity before the truck pulled back on the road and Eli returned to the car, but it was probably no more than ten minutes. She grabbed his face and kissed him hard on the mouth.

“What was that for?” he asked when they separated.

“I was scared for you.”

His dark eyes warmed. “It was just a teenager going too fast, not a murderer on the run. I wasn’t in any danger.”

“You could have been hit by a car.”

“Well, yeah.” He buckled in. “That does happen, sometimes. It’s one of the biggest hazards of this job. In a small town like this, we’re just as likely to die in a crash or get hit by a car as get shot.”

“Be careful. Promise me, Eli.”

He ran his thumb along her cheekbone. “I promise.”

She sat back, her heart still beating a little too fast. “How much was the ticket for?”

“A buck twenty.” Eli grinned. “His parents are going to be pissed, but maybe he’ll think twice before he presses that gas pedal. I let him know this stretch is part of my regular patrol, so if he doesn’t, I’ll see him again. It’s funny, because this is probably the number one thing people hate about what I do, but it’s something I truly believe in. This highway is a killer. It’s narrow and made of hairpin curves. If I can stop one person from wrapping their car around a tree, I consider that a huge win.”

Emma suspected his dad’s death had a lot to do with that. She reached out impulsively and squeezed his thigh. He covered her hand with his, keeping her from retreating.

“I used to think this job was so easy, you know? Not that it’s not hard work, but I thought it was work that was easy to do right. Simple. Everything was black-and-white. You break the law, I make sure you face the consequences. But it turned out that there’s a lot more gray, even when it comes to the law. Maybe especially when it comes to the law. Justice is supposed to be blind, but I get the feeling that bitch peeks a little, and not in a helpful way. I realized that when your dad was sentenced.”

Oh, no. She didn’t want to talk about this. She tugged at her hand, but he held tight.

“Please, Emma. Let me say this. I need you to hear me. This isn’t about you and me and what went wrong there. It’s just about me. How I do my job.”

She swallowed hard and nodded. “Okay.”

“You know what the cost of an inmate in North Carolina is? Thirty-three thousand dollars a year. For eight years, that’s over a quarter million dollars. That’s the cost to taxpayers for your dad’s prison time for a crime he wouldn’t ever have committed if that quarter million had been available to pay for your mom’s cancer treatments instead. It’s a fucked up system, and it put me in a dark place knowing that. Knowing I was a part of it.”

He rubbed the back of her hand with his thumb. “I nearly quit the force. I signed up to do good, and it didn’t feel very good to arrest your dad. Maybe I would have actually quit if Hart’s Ridge hadn’t gone in a different direction.”

“You mean making a deal with the county to consolidate the police force?”

He nodded. “It was a financial decision, of course. It always comes down to money. Policing was the biggest line item of the Hart’s Ridge budget by tens of thousands of dollars. And for what? Domestic disturbances, loose dogs, stupid conflicts between neighbors? I’m happy to take care of all those things—especially when the wife actually lets us make the arrest—but it doesn’t make sense to have a whole police department ten deep to do it. We don’t have much other violent crime here. There’s been one murder in the last fifteen years, and the husband did it, open and shut case. Yeah, there’s drugs, but most of that ends with charges of disorderly conduct. Hart’s Ridge didn’t need ten officers. We needed social workers and health clinics, not empty jail cells. So Hart’s Ridge voted—you remember that.”

She nodded. She hadn’t paid too much attention, because paying attention to that would have meant paying attention to Eli, but she had voted, too.

“It turned out that what Hart’s Ridge wanted was something I could live with. So I’m still here, and shit, Emma, this job is important. It kills me that you think it’s not, that I’m just here to ruin someone’s day.”

Shame washed over her. “I don’t think that. Really, I don’t. What I said earlier, that was a terrible thing to say. I shouldn’t have said it.”

She caught his face gently with both hands, turned him to face her, and pressed her forehead against his. “I think you’re amazing, Eli. Really and truly amazing.”

***

Eli hadn’t expected that. Hadn’t expected it, didn’t know what to do with it, and was pretty sure he didn’t even want it. They were nice words, the kind of words a lover should enjoy hearing, but to him it didn’t sound loving. It sounded like the beginning of the end.

Which made sense, because that’s exactly what it was. The election was only days away. Their time was almost up.

“Okay, then.” He gently eased her hands from his jaw. “We should move to another spot. The kid probably told all his friends our location by now.”

Her forehead creased in a frown. “Okay,” she said slowly.

---