Though she hadn’t shed any tears since the incident, I heard them in her voice, fracturing the words in a way that broke my heart. Libby was the expert here; I just wrapped my arms around my girlfriend so she knew I was there for her. I’d let the medical professional handle this.
“I know you don’t, but the bleeding isn’t slowing down,” Libby said gently. “I’ll give you a local anesthetic to numb the area before we do anything, okay? Milo can stay right here with you. I promise it will be over quickly.”
Eden gave a quick, reluctant nod, and Libby set to work. By the time the anesthetic kicked in, though, the police had arrived at the clinic to take our statements. I was about to refuse to leave Eden’s side, but my mom appeared in the doorway and gave us both a warm smile.
“Hi, honey,” she murmured, moving toward us. “The police are here and need to ask you both some questions.”
“Can it wait until this is done?” I asked quietly.
She winked at me and made her way to Eden’s other side. “With three boys, I’m sure you can imagine how many injuries I’ve tended over the years. Would you let me take Milo’s place here while he gives his statement? That way you can both get out of here sooner.”
I thought Eden would panic, but she nodded against my shoulder, so I pressed a kiss to her temple, offered a grateful nod to both Libby and my mom, then whispered into Eden’s hair, “I’ll be back as soon as I can.”
“Okay,” she whispered back.
I gave her a gentle squeeze, then stood and left Eden in the care of my family, hoping to hell she would feel safe and loved in the arms of the other two most important women in my life.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Eden
I’dneverhadstitchesbefore, but they weren’t as bad as I imagined, at least not with Terry Davies distracting me with stories about the many injuries her sons had sustained over the years. My favorite was about Milo, Mark, and Mark’s friend, Henry, who had gone against Libby’s advice and decided to scale a barbed wire fence outside an abandoned building when they were around Carter’s age.
Libby had simply followed the fenceline until she found an unlocked gate. The boys ended up covered in scratches, but had insisted they could take care of the injuries themselves.
Terry found them cutting up the maxi pads Milo discovered under the bathroom sink to use as bandages. After calling Henry’s parents and hauling them all in for stitches and tetanusboosters, the mothers had parked outside a drug store and sent the three boys in to buy a replacement box of pads.
I was giggling helplessly when Milo returned to the room.
“Oh, dammit, Mom. You told her about the pads, didn’t you?”
“Theyareextremely absorbent. That was good thinking on your part,” I told him.
“I didn’t even know what they were,” he grumbled. “I couldn’t understand why Mark and Henry thought it was so funny when I pulled out the box, but their fingers were bleeding too much to argue.”
Libby winked at me as she finished taping a bandage over the back of my hand. “If only there were places to seek medical treatment and professionals to deal with such things.”
With the gash taken care of, Libby turned her attention to dabbing antiseptic on the tiny cuts along my arm, chest, and cheek. Terry made Milo step back out of the room while the ladies helped me undress to make sure there were no other injuries that needed attention, then I was deemed well enough to give my statement to the police.
Rose Hanson, who’d spoken to us during the bomb threat, sat beside me in the clinic’s empty waiting room and had me go over the sequence of events leading up to the window shattering. I didn’t think I had much to contribute, since I’d barely noticed the car outside before glass rained down over me, but Detective Hanson was incredibly patient with me.
“Did you notice anything about the car—color, make or model, license plate?”
I started to shake my head, then went still. “It was a light color, but not white or silver. It looked almost like pale gold.”
“Good, Eden, that’s good. Could you see inside the car?” she asked.
“Not really, especially after the headlights hit me. There was a passenger, though. I mean, you probably knew that, because they were driving north and would’ve had to throw the brick out the passenger window, right?”
The detective smiled encouragingly. “Confirmation helps, Eden. So you saw two people in the car, a driver and a passenger?”
I nodded and said, “Yes, but I didn’t get a good look at either of them. I’m sorry. I wish I could remember more. It all happened so fast. The headlights paused on me for a minute, the engine revved, then the window broke.”
“The headlights paused?” she repeated.
“Yeah, I think the car stopped. It was like a spotlight on me in that corner of the store by the window.”
“The note on the brick makes it clear this was planned, Eden,” Hanson said gently. “Do you think you were the target?”
