All I want for Christmas is my two front teeth, my two front teeth, my two front teeth.

I was going to burst into song. Then I would simply scream because that’s what a mother wanted to do when she pulled back the covers of her child’s empty bed. She wanted to scream, except I’d never had a chance.

There had been a noise downstairs. Sophie, I’d thought again. And I’d sprinted out of her bedroom, running downstairs, racing straight into the kitchen, and there had been my husband, and there had been a man holding a gun against my husband’s temple.

“Who do you love?” he’d said, and that quickly, my choices had been laid out for me. I could do what I was told and save my daughter. Or I could fight back, and lose my entire family.

Brian, staring at me, using his gaze to tell me what I needed to do. Because even if he was a miserable fuckup, he was still my husband and, more importantly, he was Sophie’s father. The only man she’d ever called Daddy.

He loved her. For all his faults, he loved us both.

Funny, the things you don’t fully appreciate until it’s too late.

I’d placed my duty belt on the kitchen table.

And the man had stepped forward, ripped my Sig Sauer from the holster, and shot Brian three times in the chest.

Boom, boom, boom.

My husband died. My daughter had disappeared. And me, the trained police officer, stood there, completely shell-shocked, scream still locked in my lungs.

A gavel came down.

The sharp jolt jerked me back to attention. My gaze went instinctively to the clock: 2:43 p.m. Did the time still matter? I hoped it did.

“Bail is set at one million dollars,” the judge declared crisply.

The DA smiled. Cargill grimaced.

“Hold steady,” Shane muttered behind me. “Everything’ll be okay. Hold steady.”

I didn’t dignify his empty platitudes with a response. The troopers’ union had money set aside for bail, of course, just as it assisted with the hiring of a lawyer for any officer needing legal assistance. Unfortunately, the union’s nest egg was hardly a million bucks. That kind of funding would take time, not to mention a special vote. Which probably meant I was out of luck.

Like the union was going to get further involved with a female officer accused of murdering her husband and child. Like my sixteen hundred male colleagues were going to vote affirmative on that one.

I said nothing, I showed nothing, because the scream was bubbling up again, a tightness in my chest that built and built. I wished I had the blue button, wished I’d been able to keep it, because holding it, in a perverse way, had kept me sane. The button meant Sophie. The button meant Sophie was out there, and I just had to find her again.