get her seat set up.”
“Are you sure?”
“Or we can both stand out here while she screams and then listen to her the entire way back to the house,” I said over the baby’s cries.
“Right.”
The sound of the baby’s cries were muted through the window of the truck and it didn’t take long before they stopped altogether. As I pulled out the plastic and foam surrounding the car seat, I wondered how the hell Cecilia had gotten herself mixed up in a home invasion and homicide. None of it made sense. She didn’t live in the mansion we’d found her in, but she’d been hiding in the nursery. From what I understood, and I assumed Cecilia would have mentioned it, we hadn’t left a child behind. Had she been staying there? That didn’t really make sense, either—people didn’t fully furnish a nursery for their friend’s kid. And who the hell were those people, anyway? Friends, maybe, but not the type I would have pictured Cecilia hanging out with. They were fancy wine and dinner parties, and unless things had changed a hell of a lot, Cecilia was more of a good beer and bonfires type.
I jerked my head up as she opened the door again and turned to sit sideways, her feet braced on the edge of the floorboard.
“Thank you,” she said. “Again. I swear, by the end of this, I’ll owe you so much that I’ll never be able to repay you.”
“You don’t owe me shit,” I countered as I worked on the seat. I grimaced as thoughts of just how she could repay me flashed in my mind. Jesus, I was an asshole.
“I don’t know what I would’ve done if you guys hadn’t shown up,” she said quietly.
“He was leavin’ when we got there,” I reminded her. “You would’ve been okay.”
“Maybe.” She was silent for a while. “I probably would’ve been trapped in that closet until my parents got there tomorrow. I wouldn’t have taken the chance to get out.”
“Yeah, you would’ve.”
“No,” she said, letting out a humorless laugh. “I wouldn’t have. I would have stayed in there like a scared little frozen rabbit, too afraid to move.”
The words were familiar, but it took me a minute to place where I’d heard them before. When I remembered, it felt like I’d been punched in the gut.
“Cec,” I said, straightening up to look at her.
“You know it’s true,” she said with a shrug.
“It wasn’t true then, and it isn’t true now,” I replied firmly. How many times had we had this conversation? A hundred? A thousand? How many times had I argued that she wasn’t a fucking coward for taking cover when she was being shot at? That she’d done exactly the right thing?
“Thank you,” she said again.
“Stop fuckin’ thankin’ me,” I snapped, the words sounding different after I knew where her head was at.
“None of this feels real,” she said after a moment. “I know at some point it’s going to hit me, but I don’t think it has yet.”
“That’s normal,” I replied, opening the back door so I could install the seat. “Shock’s a funny thing.”
“You think I’m in shock?” she asked.
“You’ve been through a lot tonight,” I said. Why the hell did they make these things so hard to fucking install? “Hopefully, that shit won’t sink in until you’ve got your people around you to carry some of the weight.”
“I haven’t seen them in a year, you know,” she said. “It never feels that long until I start counting the months. We talk about them visiting me here or me going up there, but then plans fall through and we put it off.”
“Bet Farrah isn’t happy about that.”
“No,” she replied. “My mom hates it. I think she was glad at first when I moved so far away, but she wants me home now.”
“Didn’t your dad get in a pretty bad car accident a while back?”
“Yeah,” she said, nodding. “That scared the shit out of me. I swear, I didn’t breathe until I saw him with my own eyes.”
“Makes sense they’d want you home. You got the distance you needed, but maybe it’s time for you to head back.”
“You know how it was for me up there,” she said softly. “I have no interest in going back to that.”
“Maybe it’d be different,” I replied as I yanked the seat from side to side. It barely budged an inch. Good.
“I’m different,” she said as she pulled the baby up to her shoulder and started patting her back. It sounded