Chapter 28: Round Three

They had handed Hazel back at the nursery door, because there was nothing else to do.

Troy and Molly got home at dawn.

She sat him at the kitchen table and pressed a bag of frozen peas to his cheek.

"You kept your hands down," she said.

"You didn't."

"I know." Her thumb moved along his lower lip, where Greta's ring had split it. "I'd do it again."

He caught her wrist.

Her pulse jumped under his fingers.

"Molly."

"Don't say thank you."

"I wasn't going to."

He pulled her closer by the wrist until she stood between his knees, and his free hand settled at the small of her back.

She breathed in.

His phone buzzed on the table, and buzzed again, and she let go of him with a short, shaky laugh.

"Answer it," she said. "Your life is calling."

It was the front-desk assistant, and she was crying.

Troy was at the gym in twelve minutes.

The assistant stood behind the counter with a tablet in her hands.

"Thirty-one of forty," she said. "They canceled overnight. The rest are calling in."

"Why?"

"Look."

On the wall screen above the juice bar, Dane Ostrow sat at a white desk with a banner behind him.

THE WAINRIGHT FAMILY SPEAKS.

"Last night at two a.m.," Dane said to the camera, "a man with a record of violence broke into a one-year-old's nursery."

Grainy footage played beside him.

It showed a dark back stairwell and Troy's shoulders going up it.

Another camera showed him lifting Hazel out of her crib.

"He was warned by court order," Dane said. "He did it anyway."

Keep reading free with an account. Start After Eight Years, She Left Me at the Altar for Her First Love from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.