Page 42 of Fluffed and Folded

“Oh,” she said slowly, eyes glassy with thought. “I don’t know.”

“Is this too personal of a question? After we watched Nurse Groucho Marx together, I thought we’d reached this level.”

“We definitely have, I just don’t know. I never gave my future much thought, when I was a kid,” she confessed.

“Why not?”

“Mostly because I never dreamed I’d have one. Where I’m from, it’s not great to dream impossible dreams.”

“Why impossible?”

“No one leaves, no one gets out, no one gets better. You live a tiny life in a tiny town, and then you die. I assumed the same would happen to me. But…” She trailed off.

“But you’re really pretty,” he supplied for her.

“I guess so,” she agreed uncomfortably. “People used to say I should go to Hollywood, try to act or something. But I never wanted that. I never wanted anything, really. And then Ham happened along, and it opened up this new world of possibility to consider.”

“Was it what you wanted it to be, your marriage?” he asked. He wasn’t trying to be nosy, but her life interested him.

“I didn’t really have a frame of reference for marriage because no one I know is married. My dad took off when I was too little to remember him. My mom tries hard, but she’s so beaten down by life she doesn’t have a lot of extra to give. If I told her this was going on, she’d probably try to come. But she’d have to leave her job and all her responsibilities. In the world I’m from, when you’re scrambling to make it from minute to minute, all it takes is one thing to break everything apart. If she didn’t work, she’d lose her job. If she lost her job, she’d lose her house, her car. Her life is so precarious. That’s what I came from, and then Ham brought me here, where poverty is a theory millionaires discuss in Congress. When I first arrived, I thought Ham was so rich. Now I know he wasn’t, it’s just that we were that poor, so poor that being stable feels like being wealthy. I’m stable now, secure, and the relief of that has been so immense that I haven’t been able to see beyond it.”

“I grew up poor,” Eli admitted. It was something he’d never talked about with another living soul, something he rarely admitted, even to himself. “Maybe not the same way because we never felt that precarious, like one bad thing could break us. But in retrospect I wonder if that’s because my parents made it seem like we were more solid than we were. My mom chose not to work, so she could be home with us. It made our family feel unbreakable, but we lived on a razor’s edge of poverty, no frills, no extras, no vacations. None of us did sports because we couldn’t afford the fees or equipment. No music lessons. No vacations. No braces.” He pointed to his mouth. “Sometimes when I’m feeling philosophical, I wonder if I could put a price on everything we gained by having that family connection, a mom who was always there, who could be with us when we were sick or attend all of our school events. I was the only kid who had that, but I never had any of the other things those kids did, and I felt left out in a different way.”

“It must be hard to know, when you’re a parent, how your particular brand of mess will affect your kid,” Darby mused. She paused. “Ham wanted to have kids. I put him off, because I was a kid myself, and I knew that. And then when he died, I was relieved that I didn’t have to worry about raising a child alone. I’m pretty certain that makes me a terrible human being.” Her eyes watered. She bit her lip to press back the tears, sniffing a little.

“I’m pretty sure it makes you a realist. Your mom was a single mom, so you got an up close glimpse at how hard it was. Why would anyone want that? And you’re still so young, plenty of time for kids.”

She shook her head. “I’m never getting married again.”

He blinked, surprised by her vehement admission. “Why? Was it so bad, being married?”

“No, nothing like that. It feels mercenary to say, but marriage was my ticket out. It’s like I won the lottery, and now that I have that financial freedom, there’s no more reason to be married.” She realized it was an ugly admission, but there was something about the current scenario that lowered her ambitions and loosened her tongue. She was telling Eli things she’d never said out loud before, but the background noise of the hospital and the last dregs of anesthetic in her system worked like a truth serum on her. Maybe she was lonelier than she realized, or maybe she’d already reached rock bottom with him and he hadn’t fled. If the burglary and midnight collapse hadn’t scared him away, she doubted revealing her inner flaws would do it. “What about you? Is marriage on your horizon?”

“I hope so,” he said. He tried to arrange the thin blanket more snuggly around him and almost slipped off the couch again. “My parents were so solid, such an inseparable unit. I guess I always assumed I would find the same thing, but it’s been harder than I thought it would be. When you’re a kid, you assume it will happen naturally, that you’ll wander into the love of your life and live happily ever after. Part of becoming an adult is realizing that nothing is free or easy.”

“Then, for you, I hope it happens,” she said, raising her sippy cup of juice in toast.

Eli picked up his water and raised it to her. “For you, I hope it doesn’t.” They took a sip. “That sounds so wrong and vaguely mean, ‘I hope you don’t find love.’” She snorted and slapped a hand over her mouth, trying to keep the juice in. Eli smiled, watching her. It was a strange time and place to connect with someone, but here he was. You never knew what life would bring, until you arrived.

CHAPTER 24

Sometimes Tristan felt like a lone wolf. Much of his job was performed on his own, tracking leads, following people, performing interviews. But sometimes, like today, he enjoyed going to the office so he could remember that he was not, in fact, alone.

It wasn’t just that his once-barren office had been decorated by Josie and was now a cozy riot of color. It wasn’t that Gaines was there, ready and willing to offer an ear or advice. It wasn’t that Elyse was a phone call away, available for technical support. It was all those things, plus something more, something indefinable, but if he had to give it a name he’d call it roots. Somehow Washington DC had come to feel more like home than Missouri, the place where he’d spent most of his life, ever had. He’d left his home in shame, disgraced, unfairly targeted and fired, cut off by his family and so-called friends, secure in the knowledge that he was a pariah and content to remain that way. Instead he’d found a job he loved even more than he loved being a cop, a boss who became a friend, and a client who became the love of his life. All in all, Tristan had a lot of reasons to smile these days. He didn’t, but he had reason to.

He thought these things as he sat at his desk and touched a gentle finger to the grumpy gnome Josie had knitted for him. After that little gesture that had become his daily office ritual, he aligned everything on his desk, took a breath, and turned his mind toward the job.

There was no need to consult his case notebook, but he did so anyway, setting it on his desk at a perfect ninety-degree angle.Asher and the baseball game.There was something there, Tristan felt sure. How and why did he end up at the game, in the elite box, and why had his demeanor been so odd?

The seats had been easy enough to track down because there were only so many seats in the private box. Most of them belonged to team owners or the uber wealthy who owned seats but rarely went to a game. The two in question were given to players, for them to use on a rotational basis for special guests. Tristan guessed a lot of women filled those seats, current or potential girlfriends a player hoped to impress. On the night in question they had been filled by Asher and Dex. Unfortunately for Tristan there was no record of who provided the tickets that night, only that it was a player.

He pulled up the team roster and scrolled, half-hoping a name would jump out at him. Of course it was never that easy, but a guy could dream.

Elyse probably had a program that could cross reference Asher with every guy on the team in seconds, but she also had her own stuff going on, multiple cases she was working for Gaines, as well as two others for him. She was only one woman, and it would be lazy to put this on her without doing his part, so he pulled up Asher’s social media and began to scroll. Elyse had hacked all of Asher’s passwords, but Tristan preferred not to remember that part of things. It had become so standard to use her hacking skills, he barely remembered what to do without them.

He didn’t discover a link until the fourth page of scrolling. There was a picture of Asher, his arm around the neck of another guy who, even though Tristan didn’t recognize, looked familiar somehow. It was the type, theI’m an athlete, adore metype. Some men were used to being fawned over, used to having their paths cleared. Tristan got a taste of it when his football team went to state in high school and their algebra teacher gave everyone on the team an A, even though many of them were failing. Men who received that sort of special treatment on a professional level had developed a special brand of entitlement. He matched the name to the roster of the baseball team and got a hit. Rogan Staats. Not surprisingly, Rogan had access to the seats Asher used the night of the game. Tristan did a little more digging and found that Rogan was still on the roster. He checked his watch and decided to make a visit to the practice field.

Traffic was its usual nightmare, but in an odd way he’d grown to enjoy it. Being forced to sit still for long stretches gave his mind a safe space to think and put together the pieces of the puzzles that made up his daily life. More than one of his cases had been solved or nearly solved, thanks to an extended traffic jam.

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