“I’m here with you now, baby,” he said. “It’s over.”

“Water . . .” she said in a raspy voice.

He picked up the glass of water from the nightstand, helped let her sip.

“Your mother is gone,” he said. “I know you may not agree with what I did, but you’ve gotta hear me out, okay?”

“She’s gone?” The stress lines bracketing her eyes seemed to disappear. “Are you sure?”

He’d expected an angry reply from her and was thrown off balance by her apparent relief. But the sound of a roaring engine cut off his response.

He leaped off the bed, ran to the front-facing window.

Monica’s SUV ripped out of the long driveway with a squeal of tires, nearly clipping the bumper of Troy’s car parked at the curb.

“Shit!” Troy said. “Grace is taking your car!”

Monica put her hand to her forehead as if afflicted by a sudden migraine.

“The children,” she said.

57

Wanda Washington had been working at the front desk of North Springs Elementary for seventeen years. She had seen a lot of things over the course of her career at that wide L-shaped desk: teachers and students carted out on stretchers due to some health issue or another; affairs between faculty members that they failed to keep hidden; a bareknuckle brawl between the P.E. teacher and a parent; teachers stalked by former lovers who tried to get into the school to see them; and one of the most common, domestic squabbles between parents, always over the issue of who controlled the children.

So when Dr. Troy Stephens called her and said, due to a family emergency, don’t allow anyone except for him to remove his two children from school that day, Wanda didn’t miss a beat.

Domestic squabble, she scribbled on her notepad. She added the names of the Stephens children.

One of the aspects of working at a public school that had changed during her tenure was that an armed police officer remained on the school campus throughout the day. Sadly, these days, such precautions were necessary. They kept all doors locked between classes, too, including doors that controlled access to various areas of the school.

It had become a bit like a prison, Wanda thought, and it was only an elementary school.

The cop on duty that day was Officer Leon Tyson—or, as she called him, “Officer Chocolate,” because he was the sexiest man she’d ever seen in a uniform. She picked up her two-way radio off her desk and summoned him.

Officer Chocolate sauntered up to her desk a couple of minutes later.

“Domestic situation, huh?” he said. “I need to be concerned with these people?”

“Both of the parents are doctors,” she said. “The mother, Dr. Monica, is a sweetheart.”

“The father ain’t?”