Page 5 of The Couple's Secret
Noah’s brow furrowed as she walked toward him and leaned a hip against the edge of his desk. He touched the fabric of the shirt where she’d tucked as much of it in as possible. “Is this mine?”
“Yes,” she said. Lowering her voice, she filled him in on the lip gloss catastrophe.
“Did you talk to her?”
Josie didn’t respond.
Noah grimaced. “It’s going to be expensive to replace all those clothes. I understand she didn’t do it on purpose, but this is definitely something that needs to be addressed.”
Josie looked away from him. At her back, she could hear Turner’s chair creak. She almost wished he’d throw his stupid basketball and miss so she didn’t have to have this conversation.
“Josie,” Noah said softly. “This is uncharted territory for all of us. Wren’s loss is pretty raw right now. She’ll come around.”
“Will she?”
The unspoken questions swirled at the front of her mind. What if they couldn’t do this? What if they couldn’t give Wren what she needed? What if they were never meant to be parents—of any kind? What if they just weren’t cut out for it?
Noah didn’t answer.
“She hates us,” Josie said. “Me more than you but still, she hates us.”
For the longest time, Josie hadn’t even wanted children. After working through some of her past traumas, she’d changed her mind only to find out that she had fertility issues that would make it extremely difficult for her to get pregnant. The fertility treatment options open to them were far too costly given their salaries, and were not guaranteed to work. They’d spent the better part of last year getting approved to adopt a baby. They’d even started painting the nursery. Then their lives were turned upside down. Noah was abducted and their approval was revoked. They hadn’t even had a chance to fully process the news when Wren came into their lives. They’d been preparing for an infant, not a grieving teenager.
Josie wasn’t sure why, but the stakes felt so much higher with Wren. It seemed like the potential to fail her was so much bigger than it might have been with a baby, though she wasn’t exactly sure why. More than Josie wanted anything else in the world, she wanted to be the guardian that Wren needed.
“That’s not true,” said Noah. “She doesn’t hate us.”
“Come on, Noah. She barely speaks to either of us and yet, she literally gets along with everyone else in our lives like they’re her family.”
It was true. Wren was a completely different person when she was around other people. Open, kind, good-humored, interested, funny, talkative. She absolutely adored Josie’s twin sister, Trinity Payne, a famous television journalist, and her FBI agent fiancé, Drake Nally. Josie’s parents had finally moved to Denton back in March, and watching the three of them together, it would be easy to assume that Wren was their daughter. Even the Chief of Police, Bob Chitwood, and his much younger sister, Daisy, who was college-age now, got to experience Wren at her most relaxed. So did Gretchen and her adult daughter, Paula.
Noah frowned.
“You know I’m right,” said Josie. “She responds to everyone except us.”
Something soft hit the back of Josie’s neck. The foam basketball fell and bounced along Noah’s desk. Turner said, “Of course she hates you.”
Josie turned her body, staring at him in disbelief. “Are you kidding me right now? Eavesdropping?”
Turner held one of his large palms up, signaling for one of them to return the ball. “You’re not that quiet, lovebirds.”
Noah snatched it from the desk and scowled at Turner. “Stay out of this.”
Turner never had learned to follow instructions. Rocking in his chair, he shrugged. “It’s not a criticism, LT. I’m just saying. This kid lost her mom, right? Then she spends a few years with Dad, finally gets settled in and starts to feel all happy again and then bam! Dad dies, too, and he leaves her with two people she’s never met and now she has to start over.”
Josie glanced at Noah to see that the shock in his expression matched her own.
When neither of them spoke, Turner kept going. “Listen, the one thing this kid knows for sure, with one hundred percent certainty based on her experience, is that the people who are supposed to take care of her die. That’s a fact. Why would she want to get close to the third parent or parents in line? You’ll probably die, right? In her mind, anyway. Plus, you’re law enforcement, so you’ve got that inherent risk of death and all that shit. Just be glad she wasn’t here for the whole home invasion and abduction thing. You would have never gained her trust after that.”
Studying him, Josie wondered if she’d slipped into some alternate universe when she walked through the stairwell door. Turner looked the same with his unruly brown curls threaded with gray, deep-set blue eyes, neatly trimmed beard and perpetual smirk, but this guy was definitely not the crass, thoughtless, irritating douchebag she’d come to know and want to throat-punch. He was almost… insightful. Even the therapist Wren saw hadn’t mentioned this.
“Okay.” Noah tossed the ball across the desks. “What should we do?”
Turner laughed, aiming for and missing another basket. “How the hell should I know? Do I seem like the kind of guy who knows how to handle an emotionally scarred teenager?”
He definitely didn’t. Then again, Josie knew absolutely nothing about Turner outside of work. She knew he’d come from a department a little larger than Denton and that he’d solved a very famous case involving high-end escorts that had garnered a lot of press coverage. That was it. They had never discussed each other’s personal lives. The only reason he knew so much about theirs was because of his eavesdropping and his work on Noah’s abduction case last year. He didn’t wear a wedding band, but she had no idea whether he’d ever been married or if he had a girlfriend or even children.
Did he have children? The thought made her stomach turn. “How do you know this stuff?” she asked.
