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She’d worn the black slacks, black-and-white silk shirt and black-and-white tweed and silk jacket to honor their last meeting.
Today she would say goodbye to her son. And she would be fine.
If anything came of the collage, if she studied it and felt certain that Kent was crying out for help in some way, she’d approach Mrs. Barbour. Or Kent’s teacher. Someone.
“You don’t have to leave early, do ya?” Kent raised his arms up so she could place the board on his desk.
“No.” If she had her way, she wouldn’t leave at all.
But Talia knew she wasn’t going to have her way this time. She’d given up that right knowingly, of her own accord, ten years before.
She handed him the glue. Showed him how to best apply it so as not to damage the magazine photos. “Be sure you’re positive of your positioning before you glue,” she told him. “Once they’re set, we can’t get them back off or change them around anymore.”
She’d been positive when she’d given this child away that it had been the best thing for him.
Some thought she’d taken the easy way out. Well, Rex had. He’d wanted her to have his son, for them to have that between them while he rotted away in jail. But she couldn’t do that to her boy. It hadn’t been easy giving up her baby.
It had been the hardest thing she’d ever done. Way harder than taking off her clothes and walking onto stage for the first time, wearing only a couple of pasties, a G-string and stiletto heels. Though she’d wanted to die that night, too.
Giving up Kent had been the hardest thing she’d ever done until today. Saying goodbye a second time, after spending a whole week’s worth of sessions alone with him, in their little glass room in full view of the principal’s desk and that of her secretary, too, was going to knock the breath out of her permanently.
“I can’t decide if I should put the gun here, or the microscope.”
That gun bothered her. It was innocuous enough. A toy cap gun. When there’d been other, much more deadly choices. He’d picked a toy.
And he was a smart boy. Smart enough to know that if he’d cut an Uzi out of a magazine someone might have asked why.
She wanted to pick the microscope. To advise him that maybe the gun didn’t really go with the rest of the poster. But she couldn’t color his story with her own brush.
Besides, it was with other boy things—a computer, a tablet, the microscope...
“It’ll show up better here, don’t you think?” He was frowning, his lips pursed as he pondered his dilemma. None of her students to date had taken the project so seriously. Not even the adult ones who knew that there was a purpose to the activity.
Then again, she’d never spent one-on-one time with any of them, either.
“I think you’re right—it has more prominence,” she said as much as she could. “But only because of the grouping around it,” she finished. “Change anything in the group and you could change the prominence. Put the gun on top and it would have prominence. Put it below and it might still steal the show.” He had it pointed upward, and the shape of it drew the eye.
After some deliberation he set it aside. “I’ll come back to that part,” he said, and picked up a birthday cake. It had six candles. He pasted it on a picnic table that was already glued to the board.
The rest of their time together flew by in kind. Kent’s independent work was amazing for a kid his age. At least Talia thought so. And yet, he involved her in every step of the process, as well. He knew his own mind, but he also asked for her opinion.
All in all, without studying his collage or knowing that he’d been expelled from class, she’d say that his parents had done about the best job parents could hope to do raising a child.
Or a mother would hope that someone else would do when raising her child.
“What do you think?” Her son held up the top edges of his poster.
His work with her was done.
She had to blink. Pretended to need to scratch her nose.
“I think you’ve got the makings of a talented artist.” They weren’t any of the words raging through her. They were the ones she could say.
And they were the truth.
Her son might not have her hair. Or her nose. But he had her artistic ability, and then some.
He nodded. “I like it.”
“Good.”
Oh, my God. This was it.
“How soon can I have it back?” He was looking at her. She couldn’t just sit there and stare at him. Or cry.
“Within the week,” she told him.
“Cool.”
Talia stood. There was no other choice. She collected her things just as she’d done the other four days she’d been there. Packed them into her bag.
Kent helped her cover the poster board, his smaller fingers brushing her hand, and she almost lost it. And then a look of horror crossed his face.
Because he somehow knew that he’d touched a fraud? A woman who was far too dirty to even breathe the same air he breathed?
Boys his age had to stay as far away as possible from the type of woman she’d been.
But she wasn’t that woman anymore. By choice. It had been her actions that got her away from that life.
“You aren’t going to show anyone else, are you?”
His question finally registered.
“I can’t promise that, Kent,” she told him. She gave him one thing she’d always promised herself she’d give to everyone. Her honesty. For the most part she’d kept that promise. “I can promise you that I won’t show any other students, though. And it’s not going to be hung on display.”
His features relaxed. “Okay, then. No kids.”
Why didn’t he want anyone else to see his collage?
The questions attacked her, as they’d been doing all week, and she wondered if she was up to this task. This time. Could she even hope to give Kent’s collage a fair read?
Not that it really mattered in the end. He was being cared for by professionals. Mrs. Barbour had told her that Kent saw a counselor on a regular basis. And his teachers and father were watching out for him, too.
Her little collage experiment was just a school art exercise at this point.
Her bag was on her shoulder. His poster under her arm. And Kent had his math book open. “Okay, then,” she said, turning toward the door. “See ya.”
“Yeah, see ya.”
Talia let herself out. She made it to her car.
And then she fell apart.
CHAPTER SIX (#ulink_c318b359-c4ab-5656-a0f5-a9f119b86a01)
SHERMAN DIDN’T MAKE Kent go to bed early. He’d told his son on his tenth birthday that he could stay up until ten from then on if he wanted to. But the boy still held to his nine o’clock bedtime anytime that they were home.
He got himself up at six in the morning, too. Brooke used to wake him every day. Sherman had taken over for her right after the accident, but every morning Kent had already been on his way to the bathroom to brush his teeth and comb his hair before getting dressed for school. But he still presented himself at his son’s bedroom door every day. To say good-morning.
On Saturday at 6:05, Kent was still asleep. With his heart in his throat, Sherman stood frozen until he saw the soft rise and fall of his son’s chest. And realized that he was falling back into the debilitating habit that had practically suffocated him—and his son, too—after Brooke’s death. He’d attended a grief counseling group, but it had been Dr. Jordon, Kent’s counselor, who helped him see that he was in a state of almost-constant panic—fearing that he was going to lose Kent, too.
Kent was healthy. Robust. Perfectly fine. He wasn’t going to lose him. What he was going to do was take advantage of his boy’s sleeping in and get some work done on the computer.
Noncampaign work.
For two years he’d been surfing the internet for any mention of anyone who’d gone missing around the time of Brooke’s death. Or of anyone spotted around the neighborhood where the car her killer had been driving had been stolen. He was active on social networks. Trolled Facebook pages of anyone who said they were from that area. Same for Twitter. YouTube and Tumblr, too, in case someone posted a video or photo he might recognize from the crash scene.
The police had done what they could. They’d retrieved the surveillance cameras from a convenience store in the stolen car’s neighborhood. They’d talked to folks who lived within a half-mile radius of the crime scene. The guy had been driving the wrong way down the freeway on a very deserted stretch of California highway.
Law enforcement was convinced that the crash had been the result of drunk driving, period.
Sherman wasn’t so sure. More paranoia? Maybe. But the stretch of road Brooke had been on had been long and straight—the crash happening in the middle of the stretch where someone could have seen cars for a long distance in both directions. Even if he’d been drunk surely she’d have seen him in enough time to at least swerve. But she hadn’t done so.
The man she’d been meeting in the city that night—Alan Klasky—had said Brooke had only had one glass of wine and had ordered coffee to go for the ride home. Investigators had determined that she’d been holding the half-empty cup when she’d been hit head-on. Something about the splatter of the coffee on the air bag—her right wrist and her face had been a clear indication that the cup had been upright. She hadn’t fallen asleep. Couldn’t have or the cup would have fallen out of her grasp. Or tipped, at the very least.
He ran over the details in his mind. Arranging and rearranging had become a habit for him, too. Always looking for another angle, for anything they missed. He wasn’t sure why he couldn’t let it go.
Brooke had been killed in a car accident by a drunk driver who’d stolen a car. His wife was gone. Kent’s mother was gone. The only thing left was making whoever had done this pay for what they’d done.
Important, yes. But enough to hang the rest of his life on? Or to occupy so much of his time and brain power?
He’d probably be better served using that energy to figure out his son. But then, he struggled with everything he knew about Kent, and about grief and kids going through grief, and kids who lost their mothers, and boys’ relationships with their mothers, and ten-year-olds in fourth grade on an almost hourly basis, too.
Wonder was that he got anything else done.
Must be like Brooke had always said— laughingly in the beginning and then, later, not—he was the master of multitasking. He worked on a campaign and his mind also germinated other issues at the same time.
He slept and seemed to work out solutions to problems, she’d once said to him. She’d begun to take offense at the way he always seemed to have plans for them, to know what they should do in any given situation. She’d begun to feel as if she was losing herself little by little to him.
Shaking his head, Sherman moved from one social networking site to another and swore when his computer froze up on him.
His time on the case was limited by the fact that he didn’t ever work on it when Kent was awake. Brooke’s death had changed their son. Clearly, he wasn’t recovering as well as they’d all hoped. Wasn’t adjusting at all as Dr. Jordon had first predicted he would. Sherman wasn’t going to make matters worse by bringing up evidence in the case for his precocious son to grind in that busy mind of his.
While the cursor turned over and over on his screen as the web page loaded, he moved to the computer on the next wall in the office he and Brooke used to share and he and Kent now shared. Using his mom’s computer had been important to the boy.
Signing on, he opened the internet browser, typed what he wanted and, while he waited for the screen to open, perused the list of recently accessed folders that had flashed on the screen when he’d put his cursor in the search bar. He’d pulled off all of Brooke’s files, storing them on an external hard drive in his room, before he’d turned the computer over to Kent.
Mostly it was school stuff. Kent regularly showed Sherman his computer work. Making everything accessible to his dad had been one of the prerequisites of his son’s having his own computer. There were dangers out there that Kent might not be aware of. And he’d readily agreed to Sherman’s rules.
Sherman didn’t exercise his right to search very often. It wasn’t as if Kent had a lot of time at the computer without Sherman present in the room. But when he saw a folder he didn’t recognize— triq3tra—he investigated. The folder was three-deep in last year’s math folder. He’d never have found it if it hadn’t been in the recently used list. Heart beating uncomfortably, he clicked on it, hoping to God he and Kent didn’t have worse problems than he thought.
The file was password protected.
No matter what he tried, Sherman couldn’t open it.
* * *
TALIA WAS IN the shower Saturday morning, trying not to worry about the fact that she hadn’t even started her homework for the coming week and was working eight-hour shifts at the mall in Beverly Hills both Saturday and Sunday. She’d always been a night owl, even before her previous profession. And she had no social life—completely her choice. She knew she’d get the work done.
She just preferred to keep to her schedule.
“Tal?”
At first she thought she’d imagined the voice. Her inner self calling her to task, no doubt.
“Talia?”
“Oh!” Through the glass door of the master bathroom shower, Talia saw Tatum round the corner. She turned her back and instinctively covered herself, then realized what an idiotic thing that was to do.
“Sorry,” Tatum said, sitting on the stool in the separate room across from the shower. “But it’s not like I haven’t seen it all before,” she said.
When Tatum was small, more often than not she’d showered with Talia. Someone had to help the little girl bathe, make sure that she got the soap out of her hair.
“I’m not used to have someone walking around my house while I’m showering,” Talia said.
She didn’t want her sister to see the body that had rocked the stage more nights than she could count. She knew she’d get over it in time—time took care of everything, didn’t it?—but right now, her naked body shamed her. Illogical though that was.
“Sorry,” Tatum said again. “You’re usually heading out the door by eight. It’s five to, and when I saw your car but you didn’t answer my knock, I got worried.”
And Tatum, like Sedona and Tanner, had a key to the place. At Talia’s insistence, not theirs. She wanted her little sister to have a place to hang out, or hide out, at any time for any reason. “I was up late last night,” she said, finishing her shower and reaching for a towel at the same time she shut off the water.
“Doing homework?” Her sister’s voice came through the open door. Talia could see her denim-clad knees bobbing up and down.
Tatum knew her schedule.
“No.”
“You spent the night with his collage, didn’t you?”
An adult might have been too polite to ask. Tanner would have been too cautious around her to push.
“Yep.”
As Talia wrapped a towel around her body and another one around her head, Tatum left her perch on the stool and followed her to the bedroom. “And?”
All of Talia’s underwear was still pretty much the unmentionable kind. She just couldn’t afford to replace them and had no intention of anyone seeing them.
“Pick me out something to wear, would you?” she asked, pointing to the walk-in closet opposite the regular closet on the far side of the room. Her stuff would have fit easily in her regular closet, but she’d never had a walk-in before. She liked getting dressed in it. It was like a private dressing room.
