“March. We had those few warm days and Tressa keeps her pool heated.”
“Here’s the thing, Jem...” He waited through her pause, wanting to know her thoughts. “I don’t want you upset with me, but this is what I do for a living, and I can’t just turn it off because I’m not working.”
“I want to hear what you have to say.” As she said, she dealt with kids every day. He’d value her input.
“You remember I told you about a report of bruising? And you were adamant that if there’d been any, you’d have noticed?”
His blood ran cold.
“After I interviewed you—and Levi—I knew you were right. There was no way you’d have missed the bruises, and I believed you hadn’t seen them. It’s partially why I closed the investigation. There was no evidence to substantiate the claim, so I had to believe someone had simply been overzealous.”
He wondered if she should be telling him all of this.
“But now... The timing’s right, Jem. I think that Levi’s torso was covered in bruises. And that they’d faded before you saw him.”
Tressa wouldn’t hold Levi so tight, for so long, that his torso would be covered in bruises. She’d... No, she just wouldn’t. She was his mother.
A drama queen, yes. Unpredictable and self-absorbed a lot of the time. But not when it came to Levi. She always put him first.
His almost-full-time custody of their son was a case in point. Tressa was missing so much, and she knew it. Innumerable tearful late-night phone conversations were testimony to that fact.
She planned everything else around her weekends with him—never canceling or going out when it was her turn to care for their son—unless she absolutely couldn’t help it. She was agreeable anytime Jem asked her to keep Levi for an hour or two if he had a business dinner or association meeting to attend.
“Say something.”
He didn’t know what to say. “I’ll talk to her.”
“You think she’ll be honest with you? If she was going to admit to hurting him, don’t you think she’d already have told you?”
He had to remind himself that Lacey didn’t know Tressa. Or how her mind worked. If she’d done something she wasn’t proud of, she wouldn’t come out and tell him. That served her no benefit and could cause her discomfort. But lying to him when he asked a direct question could cost her more.
Bottom line was, she needed him. And the divorce—the fact that he’d gone through with it—had shown her that there were some things he just was not going to put up with. No matter how much he understood her inner workings.
And sympathized with her very tough past.
“I think she’ll be honest,” he told her. “I’d like to give her that chance. Are you agreeable to that?”
“What do you mean? It’s not up to me if you talk to your ex-wife.”
“I assume that since you made one report as a private citizen, you can make another.” He’d figured that out shortly after he’d breathed a sigh of relief that she was off his case. And thought there was nothing more to fear from her.
Truth was, he had nothing to fear from her. Not because she was off the case, but because she cared about the exact same things he did.
“And it also stands to reason that with your position, a report you might make would carry more weight than one another, unknown citizen might make.”
“So what are you asking?”
She didn’t deny the fact that she might call her coworker.
“I guess I’m asking you to be my partner in this,” he said. “Let me talk to Tressa. I’ll get back with you and let you know what she says as soon as I do. And then, if you feel that you need to make your call, you let me know that, and you make your call. Nothing behind your back and nothing behind mine. Does that work for you?”
This was bigger than asking her out for a date. Way bigger. And yet, in some ways, it seemed to have the same implications.
“Levi’s not going to be spending any time with his mother in the next couple of days, is he?”
“Nope.”
“Then it works fine for me.”