For the barest instant, he thought she almost smiled back. “He should have been. It took me nearly two weeks.” She glanced at Quinn, who raised one eyebrow at her. “I got a speeding ticket. Dad took away my car key and hid it. Said it was somewhere in the house, and I could drive again when I found it. Took me nearly two weeks. I looked in the freezer, but I never thought to look actually in an ice cube. I just remember wondering why he had an old-fashioned ice cube tray in there when we had an ice maker.”

This was the most normal she had sounded since he’d gotten here. Not that there wasn’t the undertone of sadness when she spoke of her father, but she didn’t sound miserable. Just full of her love for the man who had practically raised her on his own. And it was that that made him speak again.

“Did he ever tell you how proud he was of you, that you didn’t drop his name trying to get out of it?”

“He told me I did the right thing,” she said. “That it wasn’t something to be proud of, it was just what a good person did.”

“Well, he was proud,” Adam said. “But then, he was always proud of you.”

“And I him,” she said, and a tiny bit of that old snap had crept back into her voice.

He vowed he would stay in speak-only-when-spoken-to mode from here on. And keep his gaze away from the woman who kept drawing it without even trying.

“We’ll dig into this a bit,” Quinn said. “I’d like to know how this is all connected, and why it was so important that he hid it so carefully.” He glanced at Adam. “Taped in a small square cut out of just enough pages near the spine of one of Amanda’s favorite books.”

Adam immediately did what he’d vowed not to do and looked at Amanda. “The wizard books,” he said. Her eyes widened slightly. He lowered his gaze. “He told me once one of his best memories of when you were a kid was reading those with you.”

There was a long moment of silence, during which he stared at the stack of pages, before she spoke. Her voice was quiet, and held a stronger note of that sadness. “Thank you for telling me that. It’s one of my best memories of him, too.”

The way she said it eased him, at least she wasn’t mad at him again. He wondered how she would feel if he told her just how much of her Greg had shared with him. Her dreams, her fears, his worry because of this or that, and the fears any father of a daughter had, amplified geometrically by being a cop and too often dealing with the worst of the worst out there.