Maybe one day, but I wanted more time with her, just the two of us, first. When they finally came, though, I wanted them to look just like their mother.
Making her way behind me, where Rose had been standing moments ago, Mom leaned down and kissed me. “How are you feeling today, son?”
Her and Faith were staying at my place while they were here, but they spent more time at Sienna’s than they did there. I loved having everyone in the same place, and I knew Sienna did, too, so I was going to offer my old apartment to them if they wanted to move back to town.
“Good. I even managed to laugh without crying.”
Skipping around to where Mom was, Maddie swept her up in a hug. “He totally did.” Then I heard her whisper, “I got him a gift to stop him feeling bored.”
Holding it up so she could see it, I heard Mom gasp. “Is her right booby bigger than her left? And why does he look like he’s in pain? Why would he have a tattoo there?”
Meeting Sienna’s smiling eyes, I winked at her. Yeah, ugliness can bring beauty, even if it took its time doing it.
And it was totally worth it.
“I love you,” I mouthed at her, then felt warmth fill me when her face softened, and she mouthed the words right back at me.
The first time I’d told her had been when the paramedics had wheeled me out of the house and I’d seen her standing there, crying quietly as she waited for me. But it hadn’t been the last.
I knew life could change in an instant, even if it was just your ability to talk that you lost, and I never wanted to regret not taking every chance I could get to say the words to her. So I didn’t, and I didn’t care one bit if anyone thought it was funny. I meant it every time.
Chapter Fifteen
Jinx
Seven months later…
We were expected at the clubhouse to celebrate Hazel’s conviction, but I wasn’t going anywhere right now. So much had come to light and happened since that night, and it felt good to just forget about it all for a moment.
After her arrest, we’d found out that Hazel had bribed her biological father, Monroe, to hide out in his basement. Not wanting his wife to find out about his affair with her best friend, he’d given in and lied to the police when they’d asked if he’d seen her.
The drone she’d used also belonged to him, and he’d been the one to teach her how to use it for surveillance first, then to drop the bone into the grass.
Another interesting development was with her mom and the discovery of Chris Wong’s body in the trunk of his car in a small lake outside of their town.
Thanks to a warmer summer than expected, the lake had dried up more than it usually did, revealing the roof of the vehicle to some people who were picnicking there.
Identifying the body had to be done through dental records, but the cause of death hadn’t been quite so hard to do, given that he had a bullet in his skull.
And, as karma would have it, Hazel’s mom had kept the gun all this time. She’d ‘innocently’ handed it over to the police for the ballistics team to examine, more than likely hoping the bullet would have degraded over time. Wrong. The striations on the bullet from his skull matched the ones from the test bullet, and she’d been arrested.
Because her court case hadn’t happened yet, we only knew what Nico had told us, which was that Chris had found out who Hazel’s real dad was and had threatened to tell Mortimer’s wife.
As karma would also have it, she’d called Mortimer and told him, and the two of them had come up with the idea to silence him completely, leaving no chances of discovery. According to her, Mortimer had said he knew how to carry out the perfect murder after all his years in the police. So that’s what they’d done.
When she’d told the detective questioning her this piece of her story, he’d replied, “Ma’am, there’s no such thing as the perfect murder.”
July was relieved when it was all over, too, because it meant she could cut ties with Jane Hill. It wasn’t that the woman was a bitch, but her kids had been little assholes, and July was over having them breaking her stuff. Hazel hadn’t found out where Sienna was from her either—it’d been Monroe who’d told her, the sack of shit.
Monroe and Elda’s court cases were coming up soon, and I wouldn’t be attending them. It wasn’t that I wasn’t intrigued with what they had to say, but I didn’t care enough to give any of them any more attention, so I’d just rely on feedback from other people about it. Sienna felt the same and said she’d closed the door on that chapter of her life, and so long as Hazel wasn’t able to get to us, she was just fine.