Secrets to the grave by Tami Hoag

Author:Tami Hoag [Tami Hoag]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Policier
ISBN: 9780525951926
Published: 2010-12-27T10:00:00+00:00

48

Vince smiled as he watched Haley watching Big Bird on Sesame Street. The joy and keen interest in her eyes, the unselfconscious quality of her spontaneous dancing along with the character, her singing—decidedly off-key—all spoke of pure innocence and a wonder at the world around her.

He had missed this with his girls. Working long hours and traveling for the Bureau had carved him out a legendary career, but he had missed this. He would be a lucky man to get a second shot at being a father.

Not that he had written himself out of the lives of his daughters. Since his shooting they all had made an effort to stay in touch and to strengthen their relationships.

Anne had accompanied him to Virginia the past winter to meet the girls. Vince had been more than a little nervous about that. Anne was slightly closer to their ages than to his. He worried they would think he had gone off some midlife crisis deep end, taking up with a younger woman, moving to California, leaving the Bureau.

And they had at first. Amy, just sixteen, who had fewer memories of the tensions between her parents when they had been together, harbored more resentment toward him than had Emily, two years older. They still had things to work on, all three of them, but both girls had flown out for the wedding. He felt that was a good start to acceptance of his new life.

He stretched out in his big leather recliner—the Man Chair, Anne called it—in their cozy family room with its warm tan walls and cream-colored carpet. He was exhausted and still disturbed from his encounter with Zander Zahn. All that and he was going to have a nasty bruise on his cheekbone too.

Popped by a professor. The boys in the cop shop would have fun with that. Not that Zahn’s meltdown was anything to joke about.

Sighing, he closed his eyes for a few minutes in an attempt to relax his brain.

He had a lot of thoughts and theories turning over up there, and it had physically been a long day. But miraculously the pain in his head receded as he rested and used some of the breathing techniques he had learned from a chronic pain specialist. It rarely completely left him, but rather lurked in there somewhere at its lowest level, keeping him aware it could come out and nail him whenever it wanted to.

Gradually Vince came up out of the restful place his mind had been, and he became aware of the sense of being watched. When he opened his eyes he was looking into Haley’s. She stood beside the chair with her rabbit tucked under her arm.

“Hey,” Vince said.

“You were sleeping,” Haley said in her hoarse little voice.

He wondered if she would ever be rid of that reminder of being choked. At least the bruising on the exterior of her throat would eventually fade away, if not the memory.

“Do you have to take naps?” she asked.

“I like to take naps.

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