long?
Pulling his phone back off the holster at his waist, Jem started making calls to his site bosses. He fielded problems and offered solutions, helping those who worked for him to do their best work.
All the while trying to ignore the fact that he’d never felt so helpless in his life.
* * *
“SO THE NEXT part of this game is, I tell you my worst memory.” Lacey felt like a creep as she sat there in the small playroom with a little boy who had no good reason to trust her. Pumping him for information that could make a drastic change in his life. If his life needed a drastic change.
Fully knowing that for most kids, even when the change was needed, it wasn’t welcome. The devil you knew was much better than facing the fear of the unknown. And being ripped away from those you loved—even if they weren’t good to you—was the worst.
“It was when I was little and had to be in the hospital and I was really scared.”
She had to make it bad enough that he wouldn’t feel intimidated talking about his, no matter how bad it was.
And yet not so bad as to give him nightmares.
It also had to be true. Her rule. The kids in her life generally had major trust issues. She was not going to add to them by lying.
He looked up at her. “Were you sick?”
“I had to stay overnight,” she said. “I thought I’d done something really bad and that I was being punished.”
Levi shifted, sitting on one foot, with his chin resting on his upraised knee. He grabbed a new car—a pickup truck—and ran it around the track, crashing it into the smaller white car he’d left there.
“What’s your worst memory?” she asked, knowing full well that a child his age would most likely access only the past couple of weeks.
“I dunno.”
Not an atypical response, even from a well-adjusted, happy four-year-old.
“Levi, I’m going to ask you something. And I need you to be completely honest with me. Do you understand?”
He backed the truck up.
“Levi? Look at me a second.”
Without lifting his chin, he glanced in her direction.
“Will you be honest with me and answer my question?”
“I don’t tell lies.”
A prevarication. At four. She almost smiled.
“Has anyone ever told you not to tell something?” A leading question if ever there was one.
She was counting on the fact that he wouldn’t be savvy enough, at four, even four going on forty, to see that.
He didn’t answer. His hand stilled on the truck, but he didn’t let go of it.
“You don’t lie, remember?” she said.
He sat there.
“Has someone told you that?”
The next time he glanced up, there were tears in his eyes. She had her answer.
“Levi...”
“Do I gotta tell?” His lower lip trembled.
“Yeah.” She nodded. “But you don’t have to tell me what you can’t tell. Just who told you not to.”
He didn’t say anything more. So she tried to make it easier on him.
“Was it your daddy?”
Chin on his knee, he shook his head.
“Was it Mara at school?”
Another shake of his head.
“Someone else at school?”
He shook his head again.
She thought about that broken arm. About where he’d been when it had happened. About a mother who never dropped her son off or picked him up from school.
“Was it your mommy?”
He didn’t respond. Not even a shake of the head.
Lacey had her answer.
* * *
THERE WERE SOME days a guy just needed a burger. The biggest, juiciest patty of beef he could find. And when a guy had a pint-size sidekick, it had to be at a place that served pint-size versions of the same.
Instead of taking Levi straight to preschool after their meeting at social services, Jem turned their truck in the opposite direction and drove until they landed at the beach. At Uncle Bob’s—one of his and Levi’s favorite spots.
Lacey Hamilton had told him basically nothing when she’d come into her office alone less than twenty minutes before. He’d been about to say a whole lot, until she’d explained that Levi was with a coworker of hers, looking at her goldfish, and would be along in a second.
“Can I play in the sand?” the boy asked as he unhooked his seat belt.
“Yep.”
Levi climbed out of his car seat in the back and made his way to the front of the truck to get out with Jem.
Jem had been thinking about making the little guy wait until he opened the back door to get him out, but figured Levi would be opening doors on his own—exiting them without wanting his father close—soon enough. He swung the boy up on his hip and carried him toward the entrance.
It was a testimony to their dual state of mind when Levi put his arms around Jem’s neck and rode the whole way in. Most days he’d have been pushing his feet against Jem’s thighs, eager to be down and on his own.
“I don’t have school today, do I?” Levi asked as they waited to be shown to their table. He’d requested one by the big sandbox play area. Tuesday before noon and the place was already crowded.
“Yeah, you do,” he said. He wouldn’t have if Jem wasn’t feeling overly paranoid about having his every move watched. He didn’t want someone thinking that he was suddenly changing his schedule, afraid to take his son to day care, for fear of what someone might report.
Not that he thought, for one second, that Mara or any of the ladies at the day care would report him for abuse. No, he’d pretty much figured out it was either the hospital, because they had to report frequent hospital visits, as he’d learned last night during his reading—Levi had been to the emergency room six times—or Tressa.
She’d wanted to have sex the previous weekend. He hadn’t been interested enough to pull off the pretense, but had thought he’d made a pretty good excuse. She’d seemed to roll with it at the time.
But
