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Inside, a woman I’d never seen before stood in the living room with a blanket clutched in both hands. She was young, pretty, and visibly wrecked, her mascara streaked, her mouth trembling.
Then he saw me.
“Paige? What is she doing here?”
The woman made a broken sound.
“What is she doing here?”
“This is Chloe,” Vivian told me. “She’s Jason’s fiancée, and Rose is their baby.”
I nodded once. “In the airport bathroom. She was wrapped in a gray sweater.”
“Don’t.” She backed away from him. “Don’t you dare.”
“His what?”
He glanced at me. “And for the record, if Paige hadn’t picked that baby up when she did, that child would have stayed cold, hungry, and alone a lot longer.”
The detective flipped a page in his notebook.
The detective rose.
I looked at Jason. “You drove there. You left her there. Then you went home?”
“I was coming back,” he snapped.
Chloe laughed, and there was nothing sane in it. “I left for my grandmother’s funeral for one day. One day. You said you could handle your own daughter.”
“That’s why I came to you.”
“She wouldn’t stop crying, Chloe.”
“She was cold, Jason. But then again, you already abandoned one child.”
Jason looked at me then, and I saw it hit him. I was the witness.
“You made motherhood sound like failure,” I said. “But yesterday, motherhood was the only thing in that airport bathroom that worked.”
Jason gave a short, ugly laugh. “You’re enjoying this, aren’t you?”
I was the witness.