Catching Fireflies(5)
“Misty, wait. Let’s talk about this,” he pleaded, not wanting to be one more adult who let her down. She might not be physically ill, but she was clearly deeply disturbed about something. The fact that she’d come to him gave him a responsibility to help in any way he could.
“It’s okay. I knew it was a long shot.” She held his gaze, her expression pleading. “You won’t tell my mom about this, will you? I mean you didn’t really treat me, so it’s not like you’d have to tell her, right?”
J.C. was torn. It was true that there’d been no medical issues discussed, but he wasn’t sure he should promise to keep silent when she was obviously in some kind of distress.
“How about we make a deal?” he said eventually.
Her gaze narrowed suspiciously. “What kind of deal?”
“You pick an adult—preferably your mom or dad, but any adult you trust will do—talk to them about what’s going on, and I won’t say anything about this visit.”
She immediately shook her head. “It’s not something I can talk about,” she insisted.
He shrugged off the excuse. “That’s the deal. Take it or leave it,” he replied, his gaze unrelenting. “And I want this person to let me know you’ve talked. I don’t need to know what you said. That can be totally confidential, but I want to know you’ve confided in someone who can help.”
To his surprise, the corners of her mouth lifted ever so slightly.
“What ever made me think you were going to be easy?” she asked ruefully.
“It’s all the lollipops and teddy bears around here,” he said. “A lot of people mistake me for a softie.”
“Boy, do you have them fooled,” she said, though there was a note of admiration in her tone. “How long do I have before you rat me out?”
He thought it over, weighing the risks of waiting against the value of allowing her to get the help she needed on her own. “Twenty-four hours seems reasonable to me. This time tomorrow.”
“And if you don’t hear from someone by then? What happens? Will alarms go off all over town? Is Chief Rollins going to hunt me down and drag me off to jail?”
He smiled at her. “Nothing that dramatic. Just expect me to drop by your house around dinnertime to have that talk with your folks.” He held her gaze. “So, do we have a deal?”
“I’d rather have that note for school,” she said regretfully, “but, yeah, I guess we have a deal.”
J.C. watched her leave his office and prayed he’d done the right thing. If she’d seemed even a tiny bit depressed, he wouldn’t have given her the leeway to work this out for herself. He’d have been all over it. Misty struck him as a kid who just needed a bit of a shove to solve this problem for herself. And, in his experience, the sense of empowerment that came from that could go a long way toward healing whatever issues a teen might be facing.
He’d just spend the next twenty-four hours praying his instincts in this instance had been right.
2
Since he’d sworn off dating, J.C. tended to spend a portion of most evenings at Fit for Anything, the new gym for men that had just opened in town. An hour-long workout before he headed home for dinner constituted what passed for his sorry social life most of the time.
It was a lot easier to pretend working out was a good substitute for dating in this environment than it had been at Dexter’s. Nobody had wanted to spend a minute longer than necessary in that dump. Here, he could even grab a bite to eat before heading home, and since the healthy food selections were supplied by Sullivan’s, one of the region’s best restaurants, they weren’t half bad.
Though it had taken a while because of his working partnership with Bill Townsend—a pariah with some people since his very messy divorce from Maddie a number of years ago—J.C. had eventually become friendly with Cal Maddox, Ronnie Sullivan and a few of the other men involved with the gym. As long as he left Bill out of the conversation, they seemed to get along just fine.
Tonight he found Cal here, just finishing up his own workout.
“You’re late,” Cal noted. “Don’t tell me you finally asked some woman out for coffee and broke the hearts of all the matchmakers in Serenity.”
J.C. chuckled. “Sadly, no. I had an unexpected after-hours visit from a patient.”
Cal immediately looked concerned. “An emergency? Was it a kid I might know?”
Though he wasn’t about to violate Misty’s confidence, he wondered if Cal would have any insights about what might be going on to make her dislike school so much she wanted to quit. “Do you know Misty Dawson?” he asked.