Total pages in book: 80
Estimated words: 78364 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 392(@200wpm)___ 313(@250wpm)___ 261(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 78364 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 392(@200wpm)___ 313(@250wpm)___ 261(@300wpm)
Except…technically, I was right. Because guess who ended up with a guy his own age? I was ready with the whole told-ya-so if anyone brought it up. Not that anyone would. I had a reputation for being a bit scary. I was the old man in our office team, after all. Or at least, the younger guys thought so. It was why, I was sure, Doyle had split me and Bodhi up to begin with. If I was thinking about it all logically, probably having Doyle put me and Bodhi back together was a bad thing. Better to leave it like it was until Bodhi left on his Fourth of July vacation. He’d be gone for a week and then go back out for his wedding and honeymoon two months after. And really, who knew if he would even come back. If your husband was a millionaire, why did you have to work? Not that Bodhi didn’t love being a marshal just as much as I did, but I always got the feeling he could also leave it behind and not look back. That wasn’t a bad thing, especially if you wanted a well-balanced life. If he left, he could fall back on his second love. He’d gone to school on a tennis scholarship and studied criminal justice, but he had a minor in art, pottery being his thing. And now it was finally within Bodhi’s grasp to devote himself to something he loved.
I had a vision of him in some lake house, waking up every morning and going upstairs to his studio, where he opened the French doors so he could see the water and breathe in the cool air. I imagined him with a mug of coffee before he sat down at his potter’s wheel. And yes, it was right out of The Notebook, which I’d been forced to watch by Sergio, but I could see that as his life. And he deserved it. He’d done his time finding kids, walking through bloody crime scenes, hunting violent fugitives, and sitting on stakeouts. If he wanted to leave it all behind, no one would find that weak. The burnout rate for all kinds of law enforcement was high, and that made sense. If every day you had to see the worst of humanity, how long were you supposed to keep trying to be the break against the pounding waves? For me, the commitment was lifelong. For him, I suspected the end was near. And I’d miss him when he left, but maybe this was how it was always going to end up.
TWO
It wasn’t fair for both Bodhi and me to have to sit at the hospital with Washington on a rainy, humid Monday morning when one of us was more than enough, so I told him he was free to go. Plus, Hayden had friends in town he wanted Bodhi to meet and have lunch with, one of which was Davis Warren, who was not only his best friend, but who would also be the best man at the wedding. Since Bodhi had asked me to be his, we would have to meet at some point. Davis and Hayden had been friends since Exeter, and then gone to Harvard together. After graduating from law school and passing the bar on his first try—Bodhi had told me that like it would mean something to me—Hayden had joined the firm his father owned, and that his grandfather had started. But Talbot and Leeds, one of the top firms in Chicago, had recruited him in his fourth year, and he’d moved. He and Bodhi had met at a club late last year, and three months later it was serious. They had spent New Year’s skiing in Vail with Hayden’s family, and another two months after that, Hayden had gotten down on one knee at a friend’s Valentine’s Day party. It was very romantic, but apparently, that was the kind of guy Hayden was.
I hated him.
The officers who’d helped us earlier—Jardin and his partner, Esposito—came to see me and Washington at the hospital when I called and said I had no idea when we would be in. I also had to call his lawyer from the trial and the ASA who’d been assigned to the case.
“Nooo,” Assistant State Attorney Aspen Clark whined when she threw open the curtain to reveal me, the two uniformed officers, and Terry Washington lying in the bed.
“Ta-da!” I announced to make it more exciting for her. Like a magic show.
“Stop that,” she growled, then gestured at Washington. “Why is he not in jail?”
“I can explain,” he told her.
“He can explain,” I echoed. Since I’d already heard the insane story, I wasn’t going to tell her but instead enjoy her hearing it for herself.
For whatever reason, last Thursday, Washington had been taken with others from the MCC to bond court. That in itself wasn’t crazy. Lots of people with continuances and no one to pay their bond stayed in prison, but you still had to go back and forth to appear before the judge. The issue was, why was he going? Washington’s sentence was set.