“How worried should I be?” he asked his incredibly patient neighbor as she pulled out of the parking lot. “Assuming Maddie really is hanging out with Dingo and Dumber…?”
As she drove, Shayla made the face—lips pressed temporarily together, slightly furrowed brow—that told him she was giving careful thought to her coming word choice. “If Maddie’s…involved with one of them—and my guess would be that it’s Dingo—she certainly wouldn’t be the first fifteen-year-old girl in the history of the world to be sexually active. She also wouldn’t be the first girl to tell her twenty-year-old boyfriend that she’s eighteen even though she’s not. Or, you know, maybe it just didn’t come up. When you were his age, did you ask the hot girls who wanted to sleep with you for their ID, with their proof of age?”
“So. DefCon One,” he said around his bite of burger.
Shayla’s eyes danced as she laughed. “DefCon Four,” she corrected him. “Back it down, Lieutenant. You shook the jailbait tree. Let’s give Dingo time to have the Are you freaking kidding me conversation with Maddie. Although if it’s okay with you, I’d like to swing past the mall again. Go back into the parking garage, see if the car’s still there. I keep thinking we missed something.”
He wiped his mouth and chin with the ridiculously small napkin that had been thrown into his bag. “Personally, I wouldn’t mind another conversation with good old Dingo.” He went into a fake Aussie accent as he crumpled his trash. “Maybe with my hand around his throat this time.”
“Yeah, because that always works,” she said, giving him that now-familiar hard look that he’d quickly IDed as massive attitude-filled judgment.
Pete smiled at it—at her—despite the bad mix of burger, uneasiness, and ire that was churning in his gut. “Yeah, I know, I was just…being a jerk. Frankly, I’m trying really hard not to freak out.”
“You’re doing great,” she told him. She had a switch that she could flip in a heartbeat—from disapproval to 200 percent reassurance. It was fun to watch her do it, because she was also 200 percent sincere.
And smart. Man, the way her brain clicked along at a million miles an hour was a thing of beauty to behold.
And then there were her eyes….
Pete cleared his throat. “Betsy—the counselor—told me that kids who are grieving sometimes use sex for comfort,” he told her. “As a way to cope, kind of like drugs or alcohol or Jesus, I don’t know. I’m not saying it right, it’s more complicated than that. Problem is, I stopped listening because Maddie dresses like she’s twelve, in baggy clothes, like her body embarrasses her, so I didn’t think I had to worry about her having a fucking twenty-something-year-old lover named fucking Dingo.” He heard those f-bombs coming out of his mouth, but he couldn’t stop himself so he shook his head. “Sorry.”
“It’s okay,” she said.
“In my head, she’s still only a year old,” he found himself telling her. “Lisa got the good stuff—the toddler and the six-year-old, you know? I get the teen pregnancy years. Gee, maybe if I’m lucky, we’ll have us a good ol’ shotgun marriage and Dingo’ll move into my house.”
Shayla laughed, but her eyes held sympathy. “You can go there, but I’m gonna live in this world, where women still have choices, and smart girls—and their inappropriately older boyfriends—know all about contraception. Yay!” She laughed again, and then made a shhh sound. It was something that she did now and then, almost as if she were shushing her own overactive imagination.
“So…what exactly happened to set this off?” she asked. “Did you and Maddie have a fight, or…? If you don’t mind my asking.”
“No,” Pete said. “It’s okay. And no fight. No blow-up, nothing big, nothing…I mean, yeah, I’ve had to lay down some rules. Set a curfew. Without it, she just wandered home whenever she felt like it—sometimes past midnight. And I know she wasn’t happy when I finally put my foot down. But…we’ve barely had any conversations at all. Getting her to talk is like pulling freaking teeth.” He sighed again. “The counselor says to give her space, so that’s what I’ve been trying to do. Me, I’ve been taking a crash course in Living with a Teenager 101, talking to teammates who have kids, trying to figure out WTF. But most of the men I know have toddlers, so they’re clueless, too. You should see the pile of books on my bedside table.”
“Shh,” she said again, but it was so soft, maybe he’d imagined it.
“How to Talk to Your Teen,” Pete continued, and it was weird, like now that he’d finally started talking about this, he couldn’t shut the fuck up, “and it’s well written, but there’s an assumption that you and your kid aren’t total strangers. I need a way more basic care-and-feeding manual.”
“Don’t we all,” Shayla murmured.
“I have this one friend,” he continued, completely unable to stop himself from babbling on and on. “A teammate. Zanella. Good man. His wife’s little brother lives with them. So I thought, damn, good resource, right? But it turns out the kid—Ben—he’s the most well-adjusted teenager in the universe. Apparently, he talks to them. Like full sentences. Nouns, verbs, even the occasional adjective.”
She laughed at that. “I think it just looks like that from the outside. Ben’s probably had his bad days, with plenty more to come. It’s pretty universal—the silent phases. My boys go through them, too. You really just have to be patient. Don’t give up.”
Pete nodded. “The longest talk I had with Maddie is when she tried to convince me to demand a paternity test, but then send in someone else’s DNA so it would come back negative.”
“Whaaaat?” Shayla looked at him.
“Yeah. She said, that way I’d be off the hook. She said, that way I could get my life back.”
“But then where would she be?” Shayla glanced at him again. “Lieutenant, where did Maddie live before she moved out here, to be with you?”
“Palm Springs,” Pete said. “Not that Lisa had bothered to tell me, but about a year ago, they moved back to California to be near Lisa’s grandmother, Kiyo. Lisa’s mother died years ago, but her grandmother’s still, well…Kiyo’s in a nursing home, she’s not…any kind of option for Maddie.” He shook his head. “I actually drove out there this morning, but no one at the facility had seen Maddie since our last visit.” He’d tried to call, but they kept putting him on hold, so he’d finally just got into his truck and gone there—wasted six solid hours on the road.
Shayla nodded. “Okay, but is it possible that there’s someone else in Palm Springs, not necessarily a blood relative—maybe a good friend of Lisa’s—that Maddie might prefer to live with?”
“If that’s the case,” Pete asked, “then why wouldn’t she say something?” But then he laughed and answered his own question. “Maybe because she’s not saying much of anything.”
“Teenagers are complicated,” she reminded him. “Maybe Maddie doesn’t think she has a choice. Or maybe she’s just not thinking at all. I mean, her mom just died. She’s probably still completely overwhelmed.”
“So…how do I broach that topic?” Pete asked. “Hey, Maddie, is there anyone else out there, instead of me, that you’d rather live with?” He shook his head. “I don’t want her to think that I don’t want her.”
“But you just told me that she already believes that,” Shayla pointed out. “Was there anyone you saw at the funeral—”
“I wasn’t there,” he said. “I didn’t get called until, well, it was a week and a half after Lisa was buried.”
“Seriously?”
“Maddie didn’t mention me to anyone,” he confessed. “I gotta assume she was in shock. And Kiyo has Alzheimer’s, plus a bunch of other health issues. Maddie was already placed in temporary foster care when one of the longtime staff at the nursing home thought to ask about the Navy SEAL father. Thank God. That’s when social services finally tracked me down.”
“Wow. Forgive me for asking this, but it sounds like, well, do you have a sense of how Lisa…” Shayla stopped and then started again. “It
occurs to me that Lisa may not have painted the, um, most flattering portrait. Of you.” As she glanced at him again, it was clear that she knew he wasn’t quite following, so she went point-blank. “Is it possible that Lisa trash-talked you to the point that Maddie would’ve rather risked going into foster care than live with, you know, her horrible monster of a father?”
“Jesus,” he said.
She attempted to soften her words. “Even the nicest exes can be shitty when under duress. And if you ever had any trouble, say, making child support payments, Lisa may have—”
“I didn’t,” Pete cut her off. “No. Not ever.” But then he corrected himself. “At first, because they moved around so much, the checks sometimes came back as undeliverable. But about twelve years ago, we set up a direct deposit account, so…Problem solved. Of course, that kept me from knowing where they were.” He sighed, because Lisa had been pretty crazy. “With that said, I really don’t know what Lisa told Maddie about me. All I know is that every time I tried to set up a visit, there was some ‘emergency’ and Lisa canceled.” He looked at her again. “And you’re right. It’s definitely weird that Maddie didn’t mention me to any of the social workers.”
“That’s another really awkward question to ask Maddie,” Shayla said. “You don’t want to put her on the spot with Please repeat to me all the nasty crap your mother ever said about me, so I can attempt to refute it in the face of her permanent absence. If I were you? I’d put on my amateur PI hat and sleuth it out. There are questions you can ask Maddie, things like Where exactly did you live? and Where did your mom work? And Did your mom have any good friends? Then you and Maddie can make another road trip to Palm Springs, let her visit her Great-Grandmother Kiyo while you go and round up some of Lisa’s neighbors, co-workers, and friends, and ask them the hard questions.” Her smile was filled with encouragement. “A bonus is that Maddie might really appreciate the chance to talk about her mother. And to hear about Lisa from you—you know, the fun stories, from before things went south.”
He nodded again. “That’s…good advice. Assuming I find Maddie.”
“We’ll find her,” Shay said. “But if we don’t—and I mean don’t find her right away because we’ll find her eventually…Well, another thing we could do is get a list of everyone who was at Lisa’s funeral or memorial service, go talk to them.”
She’d said we. Four times.
She’d noticed, too, and was instantly embarrassed. “Sorry,” she said quickly.
Pete was used to being we-ed by the women he encountered. It’s noisy here tonight. We could go to your place…This whole bizarre evening started to feel significantly more familiar—aside from his odd flare of disappointment that Shayla was no different from the rest.
But she had more to say. “It’s a mom thing,” she explained. “Even when it’s someone else’s kid that’s in trouble, there’s this…well, it feels like a biological urge to help. So if you need any help—finding Maddie, or even just, you know, a friend to talk to—I’m here.”
Okay, she’d definitely added extra emphasis to the word friend, and now Pete was oddly disappointed by that.
“I appreciate it,” he managed.
Earlier, Shayla had both squeezed his hand and patted him on the knee, like she was some kind of mom-to-the-universe. It had bugged him, because she wasn’t his mom—not even close. Yes, she was older than he was, but not by more than a few years. And she was smart, funny, and cute.
Although moms usually came with dads, and he’d expected her to be full-family equipped and filed under taken. But it didn’t take him long to note that she wasn’t wearing a wedding band, which had kind of made his head explode.
Not that Pete was actively looking for a date or a hookup or any variation of the two. Because, really, all he ever had to do to find a little no-strings fun was go to the LadyBug Lounge. The Bug was well known as a SEAL hangout, and he could almost always find an enthusiastic young tourist-type ready to we him for a few hours, because she wanted to add Navy SEAL to her Things I Did on My California Vacation list.
Except, he hadn’t been to the Bug in a long time. And not just because he now had a fifteen-year-old for a housemate. Over the past few years or so, even the several hours’ investment into a no-strings bar hookup had seemed too labor-intensive.
And even though there was no way in hell that he was going to have any kind of a thing with a woman who lived across the street—complications and repercussions would abound, and breaking up would involve having to move house—he was suddenly curious about Shayla’s lack of ring. Maybe she was allergic to metals. Was anyone allergic to gold? He didn’t think so. It just seemed so freaking unlikely that she was divorced. Widowed, maybe, but then wouldn’t she have kept wearing her wedding band?
He got some answers with an easy fishing expedition. “You, uh, talk about, um, shitty exes like you have direct experience. Or is that just, you know, research for your books…?”
She glanced at him as she slowed to make the left turn into the mall parking garage, again whispering a small shh before she answered. “My ex is actually a friend. At least he is now. Okay, maybe he’s more of a frenemy, but we definitely get along. We have to. The boys need us to.”
And now Pete was curious about what kind of fool would fuck up his marriage to this woman.
Shayla was still explaining. “And FYI, it’s never going to end. I’m going to be eighty and attending Tevin’s as-of-yet-unborn son’s son’s wedding, and Carter is going to be sitting right there, too. With whatever number child-bride he’s up to by then—Ding! That’s the kind of snark I make sure I leave out when I’m talking about him to the boys.” She laughed as she glanced at Pete again. “I’m going to blame you for that. I think there’s something about you being so honest with me that makes me a little too honest in return. I just…Well, silly me, I thought forever actually meant forever, so I was…blindsided when he told me it didn’t.”
“Lisa completely vaporized my heart,” Pete found himself saying. It was weird. He hadn’t meant to say that. He’d just opened his mouth and the words had fallen out. He was almost too shocked to be embarrassed. “Whoa. Sorry. I’m…”
Shay glanced at him again as she continued down another level. “Vaporized,” she whispered back. “That is a fantastic word. It’s called a broken heart, but it feels more like a complete Alderaan than…Well, it feels like it’s just gone, with this weird empty hole in its place. But Carter didn’t do that to me. It was my best friend, Kate, who vaporized not just my heart, but, really, all my internal organs. And part of my brain, I think.”
Jesus. “Your ex cheated with your best friend…?”
“What? No! God!” Shayla laughed. “Noooo. No, no, no, no, no! Two completely separate incidents! Sorry, sorry, sorry, I so didn’t mean to imply that! Wow, and I’m supposed to be a professional communicator!”
But then there they were. At the spot where the maroon sedan had parked, and she fell immediately silent.
Because the car was gone.
“Fuck.” Pete quickly added, “Sorry.”
“The word is in my vocabulary, Lieutenant, and it seems entirely appropriate. I mean, phooey! Fudge!” She shook her head. “Nope. Not the same.”
He found himself laughing again, and she was smiling, too, but her smile was tinged with her concern. “We probably could’ve guessed that Dingo’s car wouldn’t still be here,” she continued. “I’m sorry if I wasted time and…somehow made it worse.”
“No,” Pete said. “It was worth the shot. And you definitely…aren’t…making any of it worse. Not even close. I appreciate your…friendship. Sincerely. But, I’m the one who’s taking up too much of your time. We should get you home.”
CHAPTER FOUR
Petty Officer First Class Izzy Zanella looked around the tidy little living room of the bungalow that he’d helped his buddy Grunge—AKA Lieutenant Peter Greene—move into just a few short months ago.
It was surreal. Not just the fact
that Grunge finally lived off-base in a real house with a yard and everything, but that he lived there with his teenaged daughter.
That had been the shocker—the fact that the SEAL officer had a fifteen-year-old daughter that he’d never so much as mentioned to Izzy. Or to anyone else, apparently.
At least not until that day, two months ago, when Grunge had asked Izzy out for lunch, which was as eyebrow-raisingly unusual as if Grunge had told Izzy he’d pick him up in a limo and give him a wrist corsage, too.
Still, Izzy’d gone and they’d sat outside at everyone’s favorite little Greek restaurant in downtown Coronado where Grunge had exploded his informational mortar round. “Lisa, my ex—well, we were never married, but…Anyway, she was killed in a car accident and now I’m getting custody of our daughter, Maddie.”
Whaaaa…?!
The first Izzy had heard of Grunge’s ex, Lisa, had been a few months earlier, in a passing conversation. The SEAL officer had referred to her only as a former girlfriend who’d been into musical theater. He’d definitely skipped the whole got-busy-and-had-a-baby-with-her part.
But Izzy managed to push away his indignant hurt—how do you not tell a close friend about something as enormous as the fact that you’ve got a daughter? You don’t, ergo he and Grunge were not close, and probably far less friends than Izzy had thought, as well. But boo-hoo, he’d been mistaken. His poor widdle hurt feelings were nothing compared to Grunge’s—someone the lieutenant had once cared about, deeply enough to make a baby with, had been killed in a car accident.
So Izzy’d said, “Oh, man, Pete, I’m so sorry. How can I help?”
Turns out Grunge had wanted to borrow Ben, Izzy’s wife Eden’s teenaged brother—who was living with them full-time these days. Grunge wanted help in picking out a teenager-appropriate rental house.
He’d also hoped that Ben could become Maddie’s insta-friend, but as Ben had pointed out over the past months of trying, these things just couldn’t be forced. Apparently Maddie hadn’t warmed to Ben—or vice versa. And although Ben had gone above and beyond with his attempts to befriend the girl, she continued to shut him out.
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