the baby goes to the nursery. I’m going to go put in her admission orders now, and then it’ll probably take fifteen or twenty minutes before you can be moved to your new room. In the meantime, there are some officers here who would like to speak with you.”
With that, she exited the room, and two familiar faces stepped inside. “Hello, everyone. I’m going to skip the formalities and get right to it,” Officer Dunk said. “Copper gave us a brief explanation over the phone, but we’d like to hear it from you.”
Blue looked like she was trying to squirm around even though she was securely swaddled in a blanket. Instinctively, I scooped her into my arms and held her against my chest, successfully settling her for the first time. Then, I cleared my throat and relayed the events of the morning to the officers.
“And you don’t know who the mother is?” Officer Underwood clarified.
“The only person it could be is Heidi Coleman, but her mother isn’t the woman who brought the baby to the clubhouse.”
“Heidi Coleman? Why does that name sound familiar?”
“She was a waitress at Precious Metals, but she was also injured when the clubhouse was bombed.”
Dunk snapped her fingers. “I bet that’s it. I probably recognize the name from the police reports.”
“Did you know she was pregnant?” Underwood asked in a way that didn’t sound like an accusation.
But I exploded anyway. “No, I didn’t fucking know!” I roared, causing Blue to stir in my arms and let out a quiet whimper.
Placing his hand on my shoulder, Copper squeezed, silently telling me to get a handle on myself.
“I apologize,” Underwood said. “I should’ve worded that differently. I just wanted to confirm that you did not know about the pregnancy at the time she disappeared.”
“Not one fucking clue until this morning,” I said honestly.
“Might be the reason both of them took off in the first place,” Copper pointed out.
“No,” I said vehemently. “There has to be another reason. Heidi would’ve told me if she was pregnant with my baby.”
“You sure about that?”
“All right, we have a few more questions, and then we’ll call this into the chief and get the ball rolling. We’ll likely need to obtain a copy of the surveillance footage from this morning, but this isn’t the official request,” Dunk said and shot Copper a pointed look.
He reached for his phone, cursed, and took Layla’s phone from her outstretched hand. “I’ll call Judge right now and have him email the footage to you.”
“Thanks,” Underwood said and rattled off a few more questions, followed by a promise to be in contact soon.
Before they left, I stopped them to make one request. “I would like to keep this out of the media if possible.” I nodded in Blue’s direction. “Whatever her story turns out to be, she doesn’t need to find out about it from news articles and reports.”
Both officers nodded and smiled kindly. “We’ll do everything we can to keep this as quiet as possible.”
I had barely taken a full breath after they left when the door opened again, and River entered the room. “Let’s get you two moved upstairs and settled into your new home for the next day or two.”
From the moment we arrived in our hospital room on the Mom and Baby unit, there was a seemingly endless stream of people coming and going—starting with Phoenix and Uncle Tommy walking into the room.
“Of all the calls I expected to get, this was not one of them,” Phoenix said as he crossed the room and engulfed me in a hug. “You hanging in there?”
“Don’t really have much of a choice. It’s the only thing I can do,” I said honestly. “I can’t say I’m surprised to see you, but I didn’t know you were coming. Did Shaker bring you?”
“He did,” Phoenix nodded and smiled warmly. “He had to get back to Keegan, but he wanted me to let you know that he’s there if you need him; the whole club is. You know I’ll always be here for my family. And since Pop and Gram happened to be in Croftridge visiting, Pop wanted to come with me in case he could be of any help.”
“I can give you all the legal advice you’ll ever need over the phone, but trust me on this, you get much better results when you call in favors in person. And there are quite a few people in this town who owe me a favor or two,” Uncle Tommy added