LITMIR.BIZ

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that was a mother first couldn’t bear the thought of stopping to sleep when her little boy was huddled somewhere all alone, cold and hungry and afraid.

      Shaking with the need to find him, she walked over to Buzz and met his gaze with an equally powerful one of her own. “Give me one more hour. Please. If we don’t find him, we’ll make camp and get some rest.”

      Buzz sighed, his jaw flexing. “I’m going to hold you to it.”

      “One hour. That’s all I’m asking.”

      He looked past her, toward the small footprints in the dusty earth. “Is that where you came to after the fall?”

      She nodded. “He must have come down the ravine to see if I was okay.”

      He shone the spotlight over the area. “Let’s see if we can pick up a trail.”

      Re-energized now that they had found a tangible clue, Kelly nodded and slipped her flashlight back into her fanny pack to conserve the batteries. She’d only gone a few steps when Buzz’s voice stopped her.

      “He went this way.”

      Kelly watched his spotlight play over tall grass and sparse trees where the terrain sloped gently. She could see how a young child would think the slope led down the mountain. But the fact of the matter was that the downward incline had taken him in the wrong direction, away from the campground to a higher elevation and some of the most rugged high country in the state.

      “You can barely see it, but there’s a path in the grass.” Buzz shone the spotlight over the meadow.

      Kelly squinted, trying not to think of how scared he must have been. “He thought the downward slope would take him back to the campground,” she said.

      “Smart little kid.”

      He takes after his father. The words almost slipped out, but Kelly stopped herself just in time. Now wasn’t the time to tell Buzz how many times Eddie had reminded her of him. She couldn’t talk to this man at all about the child she had chosen to keep a secret. The child he’d never wanted. She had a pretty good idea how Buzz felt about that—angry and betrayed and justifiably so.

      When they were married, Buzz had made it clear he didn’t want children. She understood why. Though he’d never revealed the details, she knew about his own childhood. About the abuse he’d suffered at the hands of his father. She also knew about the four years of hell he’d gone through when he’d worked the Child Abuse Division of the Denver PD. He never talked about it, but she knew what those years had done to him. She had been there when he’d wakened in the dead of night, his hands shaking, his body slicked with sweat. In the end, Buzz had made his choice. He’d chosen the job over her, over family, and stuck like glue to his resolve never to bring a child into the world. Kelly hadn’t been able to live with that, and their marriage had slowly fallen apart.

      She wondered how he would react when she told him she would be moving to Lake Tahoe next month. She wondered if he’d thought about whether or not he wanted to know his son. She wondered if he would travel to California to see him or settle for a two-week visit during summer vacation. She wondered if he would relinquish a relationship with his son for his own selfish peace of mind.

      Without speaking, they started into the meadow, Buzz’s spotlight playing over the grass, sparse juniper and the ever-present rock from which the mountains had garnered their name. Lightning flickered on the horizon to the northwest. Kelly tried not to think of Eddie out there all by himself and facing the threat of a thunderstorm.

      “Why didn’t you tell me about him?” Buzz asked after a moment.

      Kelly thought she had been prepared for the question. Since Eddie’s birth, she’d rehearsed her answer a thousand times. But all those carefully constructed responses withered on her tongue when she looked into Buzz’s eyes. Back at the cabin, she’d seen the emotions behind those eyes. Now those emotions were gone, replaced by ice, perhaps even a thin layer of contempt. But he was so hard to read, had always been hard to read, she couldn’t be sure. And whatever defenses she’d built around herself in the last hours nearly crumpled beneath the power of his gaze.

      “You never wanted children,” she managed to say.

      “You did.”

      “What’s that supposed to mean?”

      “I guess that could be translated as I’m wondering if you got pregnant on purpose. Maybe you figured you needed a baby, but you didn’t need me.”

      “You know I wouldn’t do that.”

      “That’s exactly what you did.”

      Her temper jumped, like a big, wild cat hit with a jolt of electricity. Stopping abruptly, she turned to him. “Don’t you dare lay all the blame at my feet. In case it’s slipped your narrow mind, it takes two people to make a baby!”

      “You were always…. I thought you were on the pill.”

      “I went off the pill the day the divorce was finalized. You came to me twice after that. Twice! Both times we…. That last time….” She let the endings of both sentences hang, not wanting to think of the wrenching sadness and blinding, desperate passion they’d shared that final night. Buzz had made love to her with a desperation so powerful it scared her. It was the last time they’d been together, the last time she’d been with anyone, and she’d always known in her heart that was the night Eddie had been conceived.

      Buzz switched off the spotlight. Kelly wondered if it was to conserve the battery—or to keep her from seeing his expression.

      “You kept him from me, Kel,” he said. “I didn’t think you were capable of something like that.”

      “Because you didn’t want him. Because you didn’t want me.”

      “Did you come to this conclusion before or after you decided to walk?”

      “You’re the one who made the decision,” she said breathlessly. “You made your choice. I merely followed through.”

      “I had a job to do, and I did it the best way I knew how.”

      Kelly struggled to pull oxygen into her lungs. Her heart bucked and stomped in her chest. She hated fighting like this. Hated opening up those painful old wounds. It had been bad enough when they were married. But with her son lost and the fear pounding like a drum inside her this was infinitely worse.

      “It’s not that simple,” she said after a moment. “There was nothing simple about our marriage.”

      “Marriage is cut and dried. Either you stay and try to work things out. Or you walk away and don’t look back. We both know which choice you made.”

      Her temper rose like hot mercury. Memories rained down on her, pieces of her life that had gone up in smoke, fluttering down like smoldering ash, burning her. “I walked out because I know what men like you do to the people who love them.”

      “Now I guess we’re getting to the heart of the matter, aren’t we?”

      “You put me through three years of hell, Buzz.”

      “Oh, for chrissake!”

      “I saw you the night they brought you in on that stretcher. You had a bullet in your back. You were bleeding internally. You couldn’t even breathe on your own, for God’s sake! You nearly died that night. The doctors didn’t know if you’d ever walk again.”

      “I was a cop, Kel. Cops get hurt sometimes. It goes with the territory. I couldn’t stop doing my job just because you didn’t like it.”

      She didn’t tell him those were the same words her father had used to placate her mother. The same words her brother had used the last time she’d seen him alive. They’d scoffed at her worry. She couldn’t tell him that she would rather lose him on her terms than on the more vicious terms set forth by fate. “You had a choice.”

      “I made the only choice I

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