The Daughter They Abandoned Twice novel · Chapter 8 of 24
Chapter 8: No Touching
There were two TV trucks outside my apartment, so I slept on Levi's couch in Ponca City.
He lived in a small brick house with a porch swing and a refrigerator that held mustard, eggs and half a lemon pie from his mother.
The living room had one framed photograph on the wall.
A girl in a pink dress sat on the shoulders of a boy of twelve, laughing at whoever held the camera.
I did not look at it for long.
At eleven he found me in the kitchen, standing at the sink with a glass of water I wasn't drinking.
"Can't sleep," he said.
"No."
"Me neither." He leaned in the doorway in a gray T-shirt, bare feet on the tile.
There was a stillness about him that I was beginning to recognize.
He did it when he was holding something in.
"Say it," I said.
"Say what?"
"Whatever you've been not saying since the dispatch center. You've been polite all day, and I can tell it's costing you."
His jaw moved.
"The plate," he said. "You had it for twenty years."
"You said that in the parking lot."
"I'm saying it again." His voice was rough. "My mother kept Cassidy's room the way it was for ten years. Ten. She'd dust the stuffed rabbit, and you were somewhere with a license plate in your head."
"I was a kid."
"You were twenty-two when I got my badge. You were twenty-four when I put up a reward." He took a step toward me. "You could have walked into a station any day."
"And said what?" I put the glass down hard. "Said I'm the little girl from the photograph? You think I didn't think about it? Every day I thought about it, and every day I thought they'd arrest me, and that you'd all be right."
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