She swallowed, refusing to let despair take over.
She was still alive.
And she was going to stay alive.
She was going to do whatever it took.
“If you could just give me a few weeks, I—”
“
You can stay.”
He shoved his hands into his pockets.
“I’m staying with you.
You can keep the bedroom.
I keep the couch.
I’ll do my best to keep you safe while you’re in Broslin.”
A stunned moment passed while she processed his sudden change of mind.
“
Really?
Okay.
Thank you.
You won't even know I'm here.
I promise,” she rushed to say.
Then she relaxed for a moment, but the next second she realized what she'd just done, and she tensed again.
For the first time ever, she'd told someone her secret.
Thing was, if she'd made a mistake trusting Murph, she probably wasn’t going to live long enough to regret it.
“I'm going to run out for a second to see about those boys from the alley,” he told her.
“You keep that gun of yours close at hand and lock up behind me.”
* * *
Murph stood in the middle of the largest holding cell in the back of the police station.
Harper was the only one in the office up front; he'd let Murph come back, gave him the key.
Eduardo and his buddies crowded in the farthest corner of the cell.
They didn't look as sure of themselves without their knives, without an escape route, face-to-face with Murph.
He could see the scruffy crew better in the neon lights, dirty jeans and wrinkled shirts, frayed sneakers except for Eduardo's steel-toe boots.
Maybe he'd worked at one point during the day.
Murph pulled himself to full height, but talked in a calm tone, without anger.
“I ever hear you get in any kind of trouble again, I'm going to make sure you're put away.
This is your last free ride.”
The two short ones nodded hesitantly, eyes filled with fear.
They knew that without knives, in a fair fight, he could take all three of them out without breaking a sweat.
“
Now, Kate, the woman you were dumb enough to harass,” Murph got to the point he'd come here to make, “is a friend of mine.
You so much as walk down the same street as she does, two things are going to happen.
One, she's going to shoot your sorry asses.
Two, while you're in the hospital, I'm going to come in for a visit.
See how we're just talking here?”
He paused.
“That's not how it's going to happen next time.
I'm not going to say a damn thing.
This is your first and last warning.
Do you understand?”
“
Yes, sir,” the two shorter boys snapped out the words.
Eduardo shrugged, hate boiling in his dark eyes.
His pupils were pinpricks.
Whatever he'd taken, hadn't worn off yet.
He had his chin down, his hands clenched into fists.
Murph kept an eye on him.
“
Anybody tell you to go after her?
Scare her a little?”
If Asael was in town, he might have set her up to knock her off balance.
“
Just wanted to have some fun,” the youngest of the three said gruffly, his nervous glance darting to Eduardo then back to Murph.
“Bored, man.
No money for nuthin'.”
Murph watched him for a moment.
He didn't think the kid was lying.
Then, out of the blue, Eduardo charged with a high-pitched scream, kicking and punching wildly, fueled by drugs.
Murph deflected the attack.
As pissed as he was at the boy, he didn't want to have to beat up a stupid kid.
Eduardo kicked hard, but as Murph moved out of the way, the kid ended up kicking the cell's lock with his steel-toe boot.
The bars rattled.
Eduardo grunted in pain.
Then went for Murph again.
Kicked.
Missed.
The bars rattled behind Murph.
Enough of this.
“Stop,” he warned the boy.
And when Eduardo kept coming, Murph dropped him with a single punch.
He didn't have all night to mess around here.
Eduardo went down, stayed down with a stunned look on his face.
Murph shook his head at the other boys in the corner, then walked out, locked the cell behind him.
He had to work to make the key turn.
The idiot had kicked hard enough to warp the metal.
With some luck, the kid got at least a broken toe as a reminder to quit being stupid, Murph thought as he walked up front to the office.
He dropped the key off at Harper's desk.
“
You keeping them the full twenty four hours?”
Harper grinned.
“Every minute.”
“
You might want to put them into a different cell.
The lock got a little bent out of shape
.”
He drove home, thinking about the boys, about Asael, about Kate.
Mostly about Kate.
She was getting to him.
He had to be careful with that.
He strode into his house and inhaled the mouthwatering scent of baking pizza.
“
Everything okay?”
she asked as she put on a pair of yellow oven mitts.
“
Couldn't be better.”
A pumpkin pie sat on the counter, defrosting.
She must have pulled that from the freezer while he'd been gone.
Odd how back when he’d left this house for Afghanistan, it hadn’t felt like home, but now it suddenly did.
Maybe the deployment made him appreciate it.
Or maybe the shift had to do with the beautiful disaster standing in the middle of his kitchen in yellow oven mitts, a voice in the back of his head suggested.
Since he wasn’t comfortable with where that thought led, he shoved it aside and asked some questions instead.
“
Is there any way Asael could track you here
?
Do you keep in touch with anyone from your past?”
He was almost certain someone had been inside the house earlier, had messed with his duffle bag.
She hesitated as she pulled the pizza from the oven, putting the stone on the top of the stove.
“I friended my sister, Emma, a few weeks back on Facebook.
I made an account pretending to be someone we both knew a million years ago.”
She turned off the oven and closed the door.
“
Who?”
“
One of the nicer social workers, Teresa.
I was over ten years old, in and out of the system, by the time Emma was born.
Nobody would take me, and I don’t blame them.
But then Teresa said she'd only place us as a sibling pair, and people suddenly wanted me, because I came with a baby.”
She pulled off the mitts and put them back into the drawer.
“We went to two other homes first.
They wanted Emma, but wanted to give me back after a few weeks.
Teresa insisted that we had to stay together.
Then we finally went to the Bridges, and they didn’t just want the baby, they wanted me too.”
Murph’s jaw tightened.
His mother had been no picnic, but he couldn’t imagine a childhood like hers.
“What happened to your birth parents?”
“
I never knew my father.
My mother had boyfriends,” she said darkly.
He suspected there was more to the story there, but he didn’t push.
He understood the concept of someone not wanting to talk about their past.
“So if someone was watching your sister’s social media accounts, they might have somehow figured out that you were connecting with her.”
She shook her head.
“I don’t know how they could do that.
I was super careful.
I’m not stupid.”
No, she wasn’t.
“What else?
What’s the one thing you couldn’t give up?”
She chewed her lip.
Okay, so something was there.
He waited.
“
The life books.”
She sighed.
“I keep online photo books for foster kids.
It’s just a web site.
My name isn’t even on there.
I don’t charge any money, so there’s no income, no paper trail.
Asael couldn’t have figured it out.”
“
It never pays to underestimate the enemy.
What do these life books do?”
“
Kids don’t remember their early years.
In functional families, there are stories and picture albums.
In dysfunctional families there’s nothing.
So you can be a foster kid say eight years old, and most of your life you can’t remember and there’s no proof of it, no pictures, no stories.”
She pressed her lips together, as if trying to figure out how to best explain it.
“It’s almost as if you didn’t exist.
It’s kind of scary and unsettling when there are so many scary and unsettling things going on around you already.
You no longer know a single person who’s been part of your early life who can tell you about it.
You’re with a new set of foster parents, the third or the fourth or the tenth.
No roots, no connections.
Kids need an anchor to their own lives.”
He’d never thought about that, but could see now how that might be, to not have anything solid to hang on to, to not have what everyone else took for granted: a past.
“How do you give them a history?”
“
Any foster parent can sign the child up, upload a recent photo, or as many photos as they have from social services.
Then I do the thing that cops do when they age kidnap victims to show what they would look like years later, except I do it backwards.
It's not very hard.
There's an app that does that.
I post a picture of what the kid would have looked like two years ago, four, as a baby.
Put some fun backgrounds on their page, like horses if that’s what they like, or fire engines.”
She smiled, relaxed for a change, excitement shining in her eyes instead of wariness.
She was a pretty hot babe on her average day, but just now she was a total knockout and Murph suddenly found it hard to breathe as he watched her speak.
This was how she should be, always, doing what she loved, and not running scared, he thought.
“
I put up a time line with the pictures, big birthday cakes showing the birthdays.
The kids love looking at their page.
It helps them process their life and their losses.
They have the account forever.
Foster parents can keep up and keep adding photos and memories.”
As Murph watched her, it occurred to him that she was pretty remarkable.
“You had a rough time as a kid.”
“
I had good people coming into my life, and they made it okay.
They made it better.”
She shrugged, as if shaking off her dark memories.
Then she busied herself setting the table.
He had a feeling she hadn’t meant to tell him as much as she had.
“
The life books sound like a good idea.
Something that’s needed.”
He gave her credit.
“How did you come up with something like that?”
“
I took a business course in college and the final assignment was to create a business idea and make a business plan for it.”
She shrugged.
“I got a C minus.
The professor said there was no way to make money on it.
He was right.
The birth parents couldn’t care less, and the foster parents get so little money from the government it doesn’t even cover the basic necessities.
But I knew I could make a difference for some of the kids, so eventually I set up the site and made it free.”