for when she was awake.
She did just that, scrambling up some eggs, frying some bacon, and making a dozen silver dollar pancakes. The kitchen was smelling amazing by seven o’clock, and Sandra was surprised the smells hadn’t stirred Kayla awake yet. It had worked when Kayla had been at home, especially when the high school years had come about. But now the smells of her home cooking apparently did not have the same effect on her daughter.
Anyway, Kayla had been out with friends last night—some friends she hadn’t seen since high school graduation. Sandra hadn’t felt right sticking with her daughter’s old curfew now that she was in college, so Sandra had simply left it at: Come home in one piece and preferably sober.
As the morning crept on toward eight and Kayla had still not come out of her room, Sandra started to worry. Rather than knock on the bedroom door and potentially wake her up, though, Sandra looked out the living room window. She saw Kayla’s car in the driveway, parked right behind her own car.
Relieved, Sandra went back to making breakfast. When all of the food was ready, it was 7:55. Sandra hated to wake her daughter (she was sure it would be seen as rude and uncool), but she simply couldn’t help it. Maybe after breakfast, Kayla would take a nap and rest up before they started their day of shopping and a late lunch in Charlotte. Besides…the eggs were going to get cold and Kayla had always made a point to mention how gross cold eggs were.
Sandra walked down the hall to Kayla’s room. It felt surreal and comforting at the same time. How many times had she knocked on this door in her adult life? Thousands, for sure. To be doing it again made her heart warm.
She knocked, paused a moment, and then added a sweet-sounding: “Kayla, honey? Breakfast is ready.”
There was no response from inside. Sandra frowned. She was not naïve enough to think that Kayla and her friends had not been drinking last night. She had never seen her daughter drunk or enduring a hangover and did not want to see it at all if she could help it. She wondered if Kayla was simply hungover and not ready to face her mother.
“There’s coffee,” Sandra added, hoping it might help.
Still no response. She knocked one more time, louder this time, and opened the door.
The bed was still perfectly made. There was no sign of Kayla.
But that makes no sense, Sandra thought. Her car is out front.
She then recalled a particularly ungraceful moment from her own teenage years where she had driven home drunk out of her mind. She’d managed to make it home but had passed out in her car, in the driveway. She found it hard to imagine Kayla behaving in such a way but there were only so many other possibilities to consider.
As Sandra closed Kayla’s bedroom door and walked back through the kitchen, a little ball of worry bounced around in her stomach. Maybe Kayla had been hiding some drinking or drug problems from her. Maybe they’d spend their day talking through such things rather than their planned day of fun.
Sandra steeled up her courage to have such a conversation as she opened the front door. Just as she stepped out onto the porch, she froze. Her left leg literally paused in the air, refusing to set down.
Because if she set her foot down, she was stepping into a new world—a world where what she saw on her front porch was going to have to be faced and accepted.
Kayla was lying on the porch. She was on her back and staring up with unblinking eyes. There were red abrasions around her throat. She was not moving.
Sandra finally brought that other foot down. When she did, the rest of her body followed it. She fell into a crumpled ball by her dead daughter, thoughts of breakfast and shopping completely forgotten.
CHAPTER THREE
It never got any easier to step into a meeting with Director Duran. He had always been fair with Kate and she even considered him a good friend. But the nature of the call and the way the last few months of her life had gone made Kate think that this was going to be a tense meeting—perhaps a meeting that would put an end to her briefly resurrected career as an FBI agent.
When she stepped into his office, he greeted her with the no-nonsense smile she had come to know and appreciate ever since he had taken over for the director who had overseen the first half of her career. She and Duran were roughly the same age (she had never bothered to ask how old he was because it seemed rude) and had a mutual appreciation for one another.
“Hey, Kate, have a seat.”
She was immediately alarmed that he had used her first name. It was very informal, something he had only ever done in after-hours situations or when conversations had gotten heated.
“Kate, huh?” she asked. She was beyond the point of being nervous around him. She made the comment in jest, as if basically painting the situation for what it was and placing it neatly on the desk between them.
“Well, as far as I’m concerned, you’re still on your extended maternity leave,” he said. “Seemed silly to call you agent. However, as you might have imagined, all of that is sort of why I wanted to speak with you.” He let out a deep breath here and looked her straight in the eyes. “How are you, Kate?”
“Good. Confused, I guess.”
“Feeling like the Miracle Mom?”
“I suppose I do fit right in with the celebrity circles, don’t I?” she joked. “I need to hurry this up, by the way. I have a lunch scheduled with Ryan Seacrest right after this.”
“I don’t know who that is.”
Kate shrugged. Humor had never really been a part of their relationship anyway.
“I won’t lie,” Duran said. “It was sort of cool around here. People quick to say they knew you. Sharing links and articles about the Miracle Mom.”
“You know, I only did two interviews. How that turned into more than forty articles, I’ll never know.”
“That’s social media for you. It was nuts. Anyway…tell me, Kate. Has your newfound fame made you think twice about returning to the bureau?”
She couldn’t help but laugh. “No. If anything is going to keep me from coming back, it would not be my brush with fame.”
“But something could stop you?”
“Maybe. My baby, for one. My age for another.”
“You’ve been out for three months now,” he said. “A little more, actually. I suppose I don’t need to point out that you’re not getting younger. Still…your body of work post-retirement is pretty impressive.”
“Forgive me for being so blunt and to the point,” Kate said. “But what do you want? Do you want me back?”
“In a perfect world, yes. But there have been meetings here and there. All of those articles not only highlight that you gave birth at fifty-seven, but that you are also still an active FBI agent. You go back out there, I don’t know what that’s going to be like in terms of media attention.”
Kate reclined back in her seat. She hadn’t even thought of that.
“Let’s be real for a minute,” Duran went on. “Yes, I want you back. But that’s being selfish. You’re
