At least now that she was off the medication, maybe the hot flashes and mood swings would subside. Lucky her, she’d been one of the few to experience the side effects, and they’d nearly driven her crazy the past two weeks. She’d felt like she’d been sweating from the inside out. She’d kick the quilt off at night with her heart racing and her T-shirt damp. Poor Dan would wake up freezing. He finally got a separate quilt. During the days, she’d found excuses to step outside into the cold weather, but eventually even the weather stopped cooperating. It appeared winter had finally passed. Temperatures hovered in the midfifties, normal for the middle of March, though the increase in temperature had also brought three straight days of rain, a trend forecasted to continue for the foreseeable future.
Tracy washed her hands at the bathroom vanity and considered her reflection in the mirror. The crow’s-feet seemed more pronounced, and she could find strands of gray in her blonde hair. Her complexion, her mother’s complexion, was no longer flawless; a few age spots had broken through. She’d never cared before. It hadn’t been important. And she knew it wasn’t the age that bothered her now. It was what the age represented. She felt it in her shoulder that ached and her knee that stung if she turned it the wrong way. Her eyesight, once 20/10 and her best asset for single-action revolver shooting competitions, had slipped to a mortal 20/20. She was nearing her father’s age when he took his own life, unable to deal with the abduction of his baby, Tracy’s younger sister, Sarah.
And she couldn’t have a child.
Where had her youth gone?
She looked at the framed black-and-white photograph on the bathroom wall. Dan had hung it when they moved in, a surprise. Dan, Tracy, and Sarah, just children, sat in the limbs of the weeping willow tree in her parent’s front yard. Why couldn’t she remember that moment independent of a photograph?
She sensed her mortality, her place in the world, and the realization that there was no one to carry on her genetics, her family’s legacy. The limb of her family tree would end with her.
Or maybe I’m still getting the damn mood swings because of the freaking Clomid.
She knew one thing. Standing at the sink ruminating on it wasn’t helping.
“Tracy?” Dan called to her from the bedroom.
She gathered herself and stepped from the bathroom.
He lay in bed, propped up on pillows, reading a legal brief from behind round wire-rimmed glasses that, along with his long brown-gray curls, made him look studious.
“I’m glad you’re home tonight,” he said.
She’d come home early because she was testifying at the Article 32 hearing in the morning.
“Everything okay?” he asked.
She shrugged. “Negative.”
“I’m sorry.”
She shrugged again.
“Hey, we’ll just have to keep trying.”
She slid beneath the quilt on her side of the bed and inched across the mattress, close to Dan. He wrapped an arm around her shoulder. “You want to watch a movie?” he asked.
“I better not,” she said. “I have the hearing at nine. The prosecutor is putting me on second, after the traffic collision investigator.”
Dan made a face. “Are they going to allow you in the hearing before you testify?”
“I wouldn’t think so, but the prosecutor said the evidentiary rules are relaxed, and the defense attorney apparently didn’t object to my being present. And Clarridge and Dunleavy want me to accompany the family, so . . .”
“I’m still having a hard time believing it’s gotten this far, with the video and all. I mean, what’s he going to say?”
“Apparently he’s maintaining that it isn’t him on the video, that it’s someone else.”
“What are the chances of that succeeding?”
“I’d say about as good as the chances of me getting pregnant.”
“Hey, we’ve got other options.”
She didn’t respond.
Dan rubbed her arm. “It’s still early. Maybe there’s something else besides television we can do.”
She smiled, but she didn’t feel like it. The failure on the pregnancy stick was still too raw. “You have to be pretty sick of me by now; I’ve been pushing you pretty hard these past two weeks.”
“It’s been a terrible ordeal,” he said. “Ordinary men would have wilted under the intensity of your torture.”
She looked up and kissed him. “You’re a goober.”
“Yes, but the law says I am now, legally, your goober.”
Dan had always been goofy. Even as a kid, one of her best friends, he’d been goofy. Back then, she certainly hadn’t thought of him as sexy, as she now did. Back then, he made her smile and he didn’t care what others thought of him. Seemed he was never down, always optimistic. She’d called him “Mr. Optimism” once, but thought it sounded sarcastic. She didn’t want to inhibit the thing that made him special, the thing she loved about him.
“Let’s just get to sleep,” she said.
He reached to turn off the light on his side of the bed but paused, looking down at her, hopeful. “You’re sure . . . Sleep over sex?”
She smiled. “Sleep is like sex.”
“How’s that?”
“The less you have the more you crave it.”
Dan laughed. “Who said that?”
“One of my academy instructors.”
“Okay. Last chance, which one is it?”
She smiled and quickly lowered herself beneath the quilt. “Sleep.”
He adjusted his pillows before turning out the light. Then he pulled Tracy close. After a moment he said, “I know your life didn’t turn out exactly as you’d planned.”
“That was the Clomid talking,” she whispered.
“And I’d do anything to bring Sarah back,” he said. She realized Dan was being serious. “But I’m glad you’re here now, lying next to me. And I wouldn’t have it any other way this night, or any other night for the next fifty years, what I know will be the best fifty years of my life.”
“Oh, Dan.” She rolled on top of him, pressing her lips to his. Amid her tears, she groped and felt for him and, eventually, found that love that had nothing to do with making a baby, but everything to do with needing him close, needing his optimism and spirit, needing to love him and to be loved by him—now, more than ever.
CHAPTER 18
Be careful what you wish for.
Leah Battles’s mother used to caution her against pining for what she wanted and not appreciating what she had. Strange, then, that Leah would pursue a career in the law, a profession in which no truer words could be spoken. Over the years, Battles had pined for the big cases, the ones in which her client had something important to lose—like his freedom. When she worked those cases, her adrenaline pumped and her mind churned. It was a natural high and she loved it. But those were also the cases that kept her up late into the night and woke her early in the morning, unable to sleep. They consumed her.
Laszlo Trejo had consumed her.