Page 90 of Sergeant's Christmas Siege

Tracy stopped pretending to eat and stared at Kate instead. Kate cut herself a big bite and was aware that it was far and away the best prime rib she’d ever had in her life. But she couldn’t quite enjoy it. Not under the circumstances.

If anything was going to make her cry today, during this seemingly endless marathon of ghosts from Christmas past, it was that.

“I know it’s been fifteen years,” Tracy said with an edge in her voice again. “To the day. Of course I know that. I just wanted to see my daughter.”

“Now you have.”

Tracy’s lips moved, but it wasn’t a smile. Not really. “You’ve always seen me as your enemy. You still do.”

“I don’t see you at all, Mom,” Kate said softly. “By choice.”

Tracy sniffed. “The judge was pretty clear that it was your father making all the decisions. Telling us all what to do. But you blame it all on me, not him.”

Kate opened her mouth to refute that, but stopped herself. Because Tracy wasn’t wrong. And she had to sit with that a moment.

“You knew what he was,” she said, when she could put words to it. “And you liked it so much that you married him. Had a baby with him. Moved out into the middle of nowhere with him, where he could do whatever he wanted, unchecked. He is who he is, and believe me, I don’t have anything nice to say about him or to him. But you.” She shook her head. “Sorry, Mom, but sometimes I can’t help thinking you’re worse.”

Tracy looked down at her plate. “I’m the only reason you’re alive.” Her voice was quiet, and the cop in Kate wished she could see her expression. The daughter in her was glad she couldn’t. “Your father wanted to put you out when you weren’t much more than seven.”

“It’s exactly that kind of tender memory that makes me wonder about you.” Kate put her fork down, her appetite gone entirely. “What kind of mother stays with a man who even discusses putting a child out into an Alaskan winter? Or at all?”

“I don’t expect you to understand the choices I made.”

“Good. Because I don’t. And neither did the judge, which is why you spent twelve years in prison.”

“Sometimes I miss prison.” Tracy’s faint rasp barely rose above the sound of the other diners all around them. “The same way I miss the compound. All that clarity.”

Kate made a noise that wasn’t quite a laugh. “Oddly enough, I prefer freedom.”

But her mother didn’t reply. And Kate stared down at her food, wishing that when she took a bite she could taste it again, but she seemed to have lost her taste for anything.

“You have to pay for that anyway,” Caradine said, when she came by to refill water glasses. “Triple if you don’t eat it.”

Kate sighed when she was gone. She shrugged her coat back on.

“Are we going somewhere?” Tracy asked.

“I don’t know what you’re doing,” Kate said, and hated that it was hard to sound calm. “But I don’t see anypractical reason to extend this interaction. We have nothing to say to each other. I don’t want to talk about the past. It doesn’t sound like you have any new perspectives to share. As a law enforcement officer, I find it concerning that you could spend twelve years in prison and have nothing to say for it. But your rehabilitation is not my problem.”

She stood, tossing some money on the table that she hoped would cover the bill in triplicate. She didn’t wait for her mother. She didn’t catch Bethan’s eye. She just headed outside.

And for a moment, she faced the embrace of the December cold, squeezed her eyes shut tight, took a breath, and wished... for all those things she’d never been able to name. And the thing she could name but didn’t bother to ask for anymore.

One breath, in deep, then she let it go.

When she opened her eyes, her mother was pushing out of the café door behind her.

And for what felt like forever, they stood there, facing each other across the gulf of their history, the night, and the few feet between them.

“I only wanted to see your face,” Tracy said. “Is that wrong?”

And if she’d said it the way she’d said everything else tonight, with that aggressive undercurrent, Kate would have gone full trooper on her. But it was so plaintive. Almost lost.

Kate had to remind herself that her own feelings aside, Tracy Warren had been as much a victim of Samuel Lee Holiday as anyone else. Kate had spent so much time focusing on the ways she was complicit that it rarely occurred to her to remember that her mother had met her father when she was all of nineteen years old. She’d been pregnant at twenty-one. What did she know of the world that wasn’t shaped by him? Could she have been anentirely different woman if he hadn’t gotten his hooks into her so early?

Kate would never know. But maybe it wouldn’t kill her to find a little compassion somewhere inside herself for this woman. She could do that, surely. It didn’t mean she wanted a relationship with Tracy, or really anything to do with her, but she could certainly try a little empathy.

Something she knew wouldn’t have occurred to her if it hadn’t been for Templeton. Who might not be asperfectly fineas he claimed he was, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t a little more evolved than she was when it came to these interpersonal matters.

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