watch the “boys” play—but she caught herself smiling a few times as she heard the deep male voice coinciding with her son’s little-boy enthusiasm. And heard the friendly dissension as they disagreed and ended up in battle. She was grinning from ear to ear as her son, with compassion in his voice, claimed victory.
She wasn’t smiling so much that evening, though, when Ethan hit her up with a request to take his training wheels off his bike the next day.
“I’m done being a baby, Mom,” he told her, his brow furrowed as he gazed at her with those big blue eyes. Jeff’s eyes. She’d never been able to resist Jeff’s pleading. And the man definitely lived on in his son. “I’m the only kid in first grade with training wheels.”
The fact that she’d known it was time didn’t make her acquiescence any easier. Training wheels were a safety net. Miranda was already living more boldly than was comfortable for her. More risks weren’t on her agenda.
You didn’t get to choose when life handed you challenges. Jeff had certainly been proof of that. He’d been her best friend. The only person on earth who knew about the beatings. He’d been her rock. And when life had turned on him, she’d been his rock, too.
Which was why, at nine o’clock Sunday morning, after breakfast and dishes and making beds and washing up—and anything else she could come up with to stall—she was outside on the driveway of her rented haven, a screwdriver in hand, granting Jeff’s son’s request.
Jeff couldn’t do it, so she had to.
Somehow. She’d had the wheels put on at the store two years earlier when she’d bought Ethan the bike for Christmas. They must have used a frickin’ machine.
“Can’t you do it, Mom?” Ethan asked, squatting down beside her and pushing his glasses up on his nose, as though staring at her incompetence would somehow get the baby wheels off his bike.
“Of course I can,” she told him. “I just need some oil.” Or some of whatever it was that helped loosen bolts. She’d read about it...
“Maybe you could call Tad,” he said. “Or I can if you gimme the phone.”
She wished it was the first—or even the fifth—time she’d heard the detective’s name since he’d left the day before. But no...all afternoon, all night long, even that morning, Ethan had been talking about him.
Warning bells had been sounding so loudly in her head, it was a wonder she’d even heard her son’s request—let alone finished the grocery and necessary-item shopping and then managed a trip to the movie theater with her son, followed by the fried chicken that he loved.
Trying to get his mind off Tad Newberry.
Didn’t help that even when Ethan wasn’t mentioning the guy, Miranda’s mind was jabbering on about him.
Bike on its side, with the back wheel lodged between her feet, Miranda sat in the driveway and pulled on the wrench with all her might. It slipped off the bolt and slammed her in the knee.
She didn’t swear out loud. Nor did she give up. She couldn’t afford to do that. She stood. “Let’s go.” She got her keys and headed over to her car. Driver’s license and credit card were already in the back pocket of her jeans.
She never stepped outside without the means to run, to take Ethan and disappear, if she had to.
“We going to take the bike back?” Ethan asked as she wheeled the bike out of their way.
“Nope, we’re going to the store to find something to help us with the bolts.” She’d look up on her phone what she needed when they got to the hardware store.
“Or we could just call Tad,” Ethan said, under his breath and with a touch of belligerence.
She let that go, choosing her battles. “Tad’s only going to be in town for a while, Ethan. I told you that already. We can be friends with him, but we can’t ask for his help with stuff.”
How did you explain life’s hideous complications to a six-year-old?
“You could date him and then maybe he’d stay around.”
“No, he wouldn’t.” Make no mistake about that, little man. Because she couldn’t let him stay.
“He has an important job to go back to as soon as he’s healed enough. Remember?”
Looking out the window he could barely see over, Ethan crossed his arms and harrumphed. “He doesn’t act like he’s hurt.”
“Well, he is.”
“How do you know?” She could feel those blue eyes turned on her.
“I’m a doctor’s assistant. I’m trained to know.” She almost mentioned having seen Tad’s scars, but thought better of it. Remembering Danny’s reaction, she couldn’t take a chance that Ethan would share the seven-year-old’s seeming fascination and ask to see for himself.
“But we can be friends,” he said.
“Yep.” Somewhere over the past six weeks, maybe even during the past twenty-four hours, she’d made that choice.
More like, it had been made for her.
“But we just can’t need him, like, to fix my bike, right?”
“Right.”
“Okay. Cool.”
* * *
Tad had been burning with anger after he watched Miranda and Ethan drive away from their house. Livid with a man who’d father a child and then beat that boy’s mother to the point that she’d feared for her life and run away from everyone she’d ever known or loved just to keep the two of them safe.
Anyone she’d have called to help when she couldn’t get the training wheels off her son’s bike had been left behind in North Carolina.
He hoped to God that Miranda’s husband really was dead, as the chief had testified. For Miranda and Ethan’s safety, first and foremost. And, he had to admit, so he wasn’t tempted to go for the man’s throat himself.
Out of his car, he was halfway between it and the bike leaning up against Miranda’s little house, intending to get those training wheels off and be out of sight before she got back, when he stopped.
He was still a newcomer to the world of domestic violence, but after six weeks as an honorary member of the High Risk Team, in addition to all the reading he’d been doing since agreeing to work for Brian O’Connor, he knew he shouldn’t fix that bike. A woman in Miranda’s position, a woman who’d lived with daily fear, would be more likely to panic at the idea that someone had been on her property, messing with her stuff. The fact that this person knew she’d been struggling to get training wheels off her son’s bike would tell her he’d been spying on her. Chances were she wouldn’t see her benefactor as a Good Samaritan, but rather, someone who’d found her and intended to control her again. Someone who was letting her know he was stronger than she was. That she needed him.
If the panic was too intense, that act, something as simple as fixing a bike, could even prompt her to
