If She Heard

“God, have I been that out?”

“You have.” Melissa took the kettle off of the stove and poured hot water into waiting cups with tea bags in them. “Mom…are you going to be able to do this?”

“I think so. Eventually. It’s just overwhelming. And it took way too much out of me.”

“I thought I was going to die when I had Michelle. I can’t imagine giving birth at your age.” She smirked here and added: “You old fart.”

“You know,” Kate said, “somehow, it became much easier to be apart from you over the years.”

This time it was Melissa who broke out laughing. It was like music to Kate. It warmed her heart in a way that she had missed. Sadly, she realized that she could not remember the last time she’d heard Melissa laugh so hard.

It made her wonder what else she had missed and taken for granted.

***

Director Duran kept his distance in the months that followed. He sent a card and a care package of diapers and wipes a week after Michael’s birth, but refrained from any emails or phone calls. Kate appreciated the gesture but started to feel a creeping sort of certainty about her future with the bureau. Having a baby at the age of fifty-seven and becoming something of a local celebrity for it likely meant her brief resurgence at work was now over.

On the other hand, she couldn’t help but wonder if the bureau might enjoy some of the free press. Not only free press, but uplifting and uncontroversial press for once.

She wished she could be fine with it, but she wasn’t. She grew to love Michael more and more every day. There had been a few days where she had resented him, but it did not last long. After all, Melissa’s speech had been accurate. Had she and Allen been more careful, she would not have gotten pregnant. Then again, the idea of being careful sexually when you were fifty-five tended to look different than it did for other dating adults.

Three months after she had been coaxed out of bed by Melissa, Kate was able to see this last stretch of her life for what it was. It would be a life of domestication and learning how to be a mother again. It would be learning how to love and trust a man with not only her life, but the life of their child.

Ultimately, she was fine with it. Hell, she was sure there were some grandmothers who would do anything to experience that feeling of being a new mother again. And here she was, with that chance.

Allen seemed fine with it as well. They had not yet talked about what the rest of their lives would look like in terms of marriage and co-parenting. He was still loving her well and seemed absolutely nuts about little Michael, but he seemed timid a lot of the time. It was like he was running underneath a cliff, waiting to be brained by a boulder that was sure to fall on him at any moment.

She wasn’t sure what was bothering him until her phone rang on a Wednesday afternoon. Kate was sitting on the couch with Michael. Allen picked the phone up from the kitchen counter and brought it to her. He wasn’t necessarily spying when he looked down to see the display; it was just something they did now, a level of comfort she had been totally fine with.

Yet when he handed the phone to her, he had a sour expression on his face. She took the phone, he took Michael from her, and she looked to the display as she answered the call.

It was Duran.

Kate and Allen locked eyes for a moment and she understood his strain.

Her heart racing, Kate answered the call.

Allen walked into the kitchen; the shadow of that falling boulder may as well have been growing larger and larger, covering him completely.

CHAPTER TWO

Sandra Peterson woke up fifteen minutes before her alarm was set to go off. She had been waking up to that same alarm, at 6:30 every morning, for the last two years or so. She’d always been a good sleeper, managing seven to nine hours every night and never waking before the alarm. But this morning, she was stirred awake by excitement. Kayla was home from college and they were going to spend the entire day together.

It would be the first time they’d spent more than half a day together since Kayla started college last year. She was home because one of her childhood friends was getting married. Kayla had been raised in Harper Hills, North Carolina, a small rural town about twenty miles outside of Charlotte, and had opted to enroll in an out-of-state college as early as she could. Going to school at Florida State meant their times together were few and far between. They’d last seen each other at Christmas, and that had been almost a year ago for only a period of ten hours before Kayla had left to visit her father in Tennessee.

Kayla had always handled the divorce well. Sandra and her husband had split when Kayla was eleven and she never really even seemed to care. Sandra supposed it was one of the reasons Kayla had never played favorites. When she visited one parent, she made a point to visit the other. And because of that torturous trip—from Tallahassee, to Harper Hills, to Nashville—Kayla didn’t visit very often.

Sandra shuffled out of the bedroom in her pajamas and bedroom slippers. She walked down the hallway toward the kitchen, passing by Kayla’s room. She didn’t expect her daughter to wake up any time before eight, and that was fine. Sandra figured she could put some coffee on and prepare a nice breakfast 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.”