And her phone rings.
“Leave it,” I growl, but she pushes back against me, her entire body straining with tension as she digs it out of her discarded bra.
“It’s the lawyer,” she explains before answering the call.
I watch her eyes widen and I take her free hand, smiling as she crushes it until the bones grind against each other.
About fucking time.
She hangs up and stares into space, panting, her chest heaving for air.
“What’s happened?” I ask, like I don’t know. As though I didn’t organise a parting gift. Scared tonight would be the last time we saw each other.
Instead of telling me, she scrambles back into her clothes, eyes sparkling as brightly as any other light from the city spread out below us.
I dress, too, feeling for the key fob on the floor since it fell from my pocket. Letting her organise her thoughts, giving her space for her hopes to expand.
“Where to?”
She reels off an address, stuttering in her efforts to get the words out. Then adds, “Aaron said there’s a problem with Sierra’s foster parents. He’s put in an application for emergency custody.”
Incriminating photographs on a laptop will do that.
I start the car and point it in the direction my girl needs to go.
CHAPTERTHIRTY-TWO
LILAC
When I burstinto the lawyer’s office, just about ready to explode with the emotional tornado spinning through my body, he’s on his way out the door.
“Follow me,” he says as though otherwise we’d just stand there. “We’ve got a hearing before a judge in twenty minutes. The last thing he’ll want after being dragged away from his evening is for us to be tardy.”
The million questions banked up behind my lips stay there as he barks instructions while taking the lift to the carpark.
“Do I come with you or meet you there?”
Aaron sees me for the first time, his eyes sweeping from my hair to my jewellery to my eye-wateringly expensive gown. “What are you—?”
“We were at the Senior’s Dance when you called,” Zach explains for me. “But we can divert home to change.”
“No. No, that’s unnecessary.” He opens the rear seat and tosses his briefcase inside. “And even if it was, we don’t have time.”
“The address?”
I hope Zach’s mind isn’t scrambled like mine because I don’t catch a word of his answer. Just see the lawyer’s eyes barely focusing as he constructs arguments, weighs options, looks cautiously hopeful…
This feels like a dream. I bite the inside of my cheek to remind myself it’s not.
I expect a courthouse at the end of the drive but find a prefab building that looks more like something builders would use on a massive construction site than a room to administer the law. It buoys me more than its opposite would. This is the kind of ramshackle setup that might let a smart lawyer manipulate his way to my goal.
The judge’s robes are shabby compared to Aaron in his Brioni suit, and Zach and I dressed up to the nines.
I expect to see Carla glaring at me from a corner or Bradley smirking at the idea that hope is blossoming in my chest. Neither of them is here. Just a panel I know without introductions is from Oranga Tamariki.
The defeated shoulders of a case worker. The pompous chest puffing of their lawyer. The cautious, calculated eyes of Sierra’s appointed representative.
My eyes dart away, not wanting to dwell on what could or should happen when I can concentrate on the action taking place in real time.
