***
Alex was exhausted and sore, but she couldn’t sleep. The digital clock she’d had since junior high glowed 12:17. After midnight and she still hadn’t been able to sleep. The familiar sounds of the old house should have soothed her, but nothing helped. She stared at the ceiling of her childhood room and relived the past. Could she have done anything else? For months she’d wondered where she’d made her misstep, where she’d screwed up, how she’d gotten to this point in her life, but she didn’t see how she could have done anything different. Certainly, she had other options—but every option had its own pitfalls. Blaming Matt Elliott for what happened to her was easy, but it wasn’t his fault. She knew that, intellectually, but she felt like she was stuck, between then and now, not knowing which way to go. Every night she went to bed, hoping the answers would be in her head when she woke up, but every morning she woke up with the same questions.
If she can’t be a cop, what can she do?
Being ambushed, in a way, by the hotel interview panel reminded her that her past was public information and would haunt her if she tried to do anything in the security field. It was time to move on. Maybe she should have accepted the job offer Dean Hooper had extended her. But the idea of leaving her family brought tears to her eyes. They’d always been close, but after her mom died they’d pulled together in their grief. She couldn’t imagine moving to another city let alone three thousand miles away. Her grandmother was in her eighties ... Alex would never forgive herself if she wasn’t around to help if Mimi became sick.
She closed her eyes and hoped for sleep, but only remembered what had brought her to this point.
Two weeks before she’d been shot by her partner, Alex moved out of Jim’s house. They’d been together for just shy of eighteen months, had been living together for half that time, but she knew as soon as she walked out that their relationship was over. There was no fixing this—they’d both said things that couldn’t be taken back, and the guilt that ate at Alex for keeping secrets from her lover haunted her so much she could barely eat or sleep.
She couldn’t tell Jim she was reporting information about her partner to the FBI. Before she approached Matt Elliott six months ago, she’d asked Jim for advice about what to do about Tommy’s gambling. Jim had told her to ignore it, but she admitted she’d seen him take money from a bust. She was feeling Jim out—if Jim suggested she go to their boss, or IA, she would have done it. Jim had been in the department five years longer than she; everyone liked him. They listened to him, and if he had her back on this, she might have made a different choice.
Jim said Tommy’s skimming wasn’t a big deal, that while he’d never do it, a lot of guys did. “You’ll only be ostracized by turning in your partner, Alex,” Jim said. “You know how it is. This is one of those crap things we just have to deal with. You can always talk to me, you know. To get it off your chest. I’m here for you, Baby.”
He was right, she knew, but it didn’t make his opinion—his morals—any easier to live with and their relationship deteriorated until she couldn’t live with him any more.
It didn’t help that he accused her of cheating on him.
“You’re distant and moody. You come home late and can’t look me in the eye and tell me where you’ve been. Who is it, Alex? You and Tommy? You’ve been spending a lot of time with your partner lately. You screwing him behind my back?”
She and Jim argued a lot, but always made up ... except this time there would be no making up. This time, it had almost come to blows. She wouldn’t be returning, and she didn’t know where to go.
She’d ended up on Matt Elliott’s front porch. She’d never forget that warm, late June night.
Alex loved Matt’s house. It was in South Land Park, near the zoo. An older, pre-war craftsman that had been fully restored. Neither big nor small, it was just right.
She hadn’t realized how late it was when she rang his bell. It was clear she’d woken him up—he wore boxers and nothing else. She barely noticed that he’d come to the door with a gun in hand.
Concern lit his face. “Alex. What’s wrong?”
Matt let her in and she realized that it wasn’t just Jim’s cavalier attitude about police corruption that had been bothering her for the last six months. It was the fact that she was half in love with Matt Elliott. Here was a man who was trying to fix the problems in the system, a man who believed in the system the way it was supposed to be. For six months, she’d gone down the very dangerous path of comparing her boyfriend to another man. And her boyfriend was coming up short in far too many ways.
“Jim and I split up. And—I didn’t want to face my dad tonight. Aiden’s out of town and AJ’s at the station—”