Coming Back by Emma South

Author:Emma South [South, Emma]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Romance, Contemporary, Military, New Adult & College, Romantic Suspense, Sports, Mystery & Suspense, Suspense
ISBN: 9781512119824
Google: iiLOsgEACAAJ
Amazon: B010QC1QM2
Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform
Published: 2015-06-07T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 19

April 2014

Dean

Mr. Jayne eyed me with the same skepticism he had ever since I started showing up as anything more than a police officer. He was taking advantage of the first really nice day of spring to tend to his garden at the front of the house, just as I was planning on taking advantage of it to take Christie out on a picnic.

He stood and met me at the gate, standing immediately on the other side so it couldn’t be opened. I offered what I hoped was a disarming smile and stepped as close as I could while he pulled off his gloves and dropped them on the ground where he’d been working.

“Morning, Mr. Jayne,” I said.

“Dean.” He glanced over his shoulder to see if anybody was there. “Can I talk to you for a minute?”

This sounded serious. “Sure, of course.”

Christie’s dad opened his mouth and licked his lips a few times before he managed to actually start and finish a sentence. “You ever have nightmares, son?” he asked, finally.

I raised an eyebrow. “Yeah, sometimes. Why do you ask?”

“I never used to have them, you know, when I was your age. That all changed when Christie was born. It was never monsters or the aliens comin’ down to bugger me that made me wake up in a sweat, either. I used to have these dreams where she’d be crawling around and I’d notice she was near the edge of a patio, or at the top of the stairs or something, just completely oblivious to it, you know?”

I nodded.

“I’d get this feeling like I’d just been jolted with one of those defibrillators and I’d start running towards her, yelling for her to stop, but I was always just too late. She’d fall and I’d see it, follow her down to the ground, and I’d pick this thing up wondering if this was the last time I ever hugged my little girl. It would kill me every time, wondering that, just heart-wrenching grief like you wouldn’t believe.”

Mr. Jayne paused and looked at his hands as if maybe picturing that baby in them again, his eyes glassy with the memory of that imagined grief. I listened in silence as he continued.

“But she was never dead in those nightmares. They used to end in one of two ways. One, I’d pick her up, I’d be praying she was OK, and then she’d look at me and I saw that she’d fallen and hit her head in some awful way and that spark in her eye was gone. That one that used to tell me she was looking at everything and learning all the time. Somebody with that look in their eye could grow up and be anything, do anything. For somebody like that, the future was bright, the potential was endless, but in the nightmare it was gone and now everything would be dull, like looking at a pretty picture through dirty glass.”

“What was the other way it ended?” I asked.

He looked

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