Snowfall on Haven Point(39)
His throat felt tight and achy and he couldn’t seem to find any words.
“That’s about the sweetest thing I’ve ever heard,” he finally said, his voice raspy. “Now I really do feel like an ass.”
She smiled. “Or maybe she just wanted to cut out a bunch of snowflakes and you were the lucky recipient. Who knows? She’s six.”
It would be entirely too easy to lose his heart to this whole family. The lovely, deceptively fragile-looking mom, the cute chatterbox of a four-year-old boy and the sweet girl who saved her own treats and tucked them away to give to her police officer father.
“That’s nice,” he finally said. “Law enforcement isn’t always very popular these days.”
“Yet you do it anyway. Why is that?”
Sometimes he wondered that himself. He shrugged. “It’s kind of a Bailey family tradition.”
“I know. Your father, your grandfather, your brothers. Wyn has told me as much.”
That was part of it, but not the whole picture. “It’s all I’ve ever wanted,” he said. “My dad was my hero. I guess I’m a lot like Chloe in that way. I used to watch him leave the house in his uniform day after day and think he was better than Superman or Batman.”
Her features softened. “Everyone tells me what a good man he was. You must miss him a lot.”
“Hard not to,” he admitted.
The ache was always there; it just hit him harder at certain moments.
He pictured John Bailey and the last difficult years of his life. Deep guilt always threaded through that image like some kind of foul, twisted creek.
He might have been able to prevent those tough final years. If he had stepped up and confronted his father in the months before he was shot about his suspicions that John Bailey wasn’t behaving like himself, his father might still be alive.
Instead, he had let his love and respect for the man color his own judgment as a fellow law enforcement officer.
His father hadn’t been fit to serve. Something had been very wrong. Marsh had begun to suspect it but had said nothing, wanting to believe he was imagining things, that his father was simply tired or stressed or overworked.
Only after the fact, he had confronted Cade about what really happened that night and his best friend reluctantly confirmed his suspicions.
John had begun to show signs of early-onset senility.
Both he and his best friend felt responsible for not identifying it and taking steps to remove John from the force.
“This is probably going to sound strange,” Andie said, breaking into his thoughts, “but I’m a little jealous that you had such a good example. I can only wish I had a dad like John Bailey, even if it meant I had to suffer the pain of losing him one day.”
“Your father wasn’t a good man?”
She shrugged. “Who knows? He wasn’t in my life. I don’t know if my mother even knew his last name. When I asked her about him once, she told me she thought his first name was Kevin and he had a cute Irish accent. That’s it, probably because she was too high to remember the rest.”
Her words revealed volumes about her childhood. She seemed so put-together, so loving and kind, he never would have guessed she came from a rough background.
“You were raised by an addict?” he asked carefully.
The sudden regret in her eyes told him she had disclosed more than she intended. “Not really,” she said. “My mother got clean when she found out she was pregnant with me, moved home with her parents and stayed away from drugs until I was about five, when she relapsed. She was in and out of rehab after that and I stayed with my grandparents.”
He didn’t miss her flat, guarded tone when she spoke of her grandparents, so unlike the open affection she showed to her children. “You never had to do the foster care route?”
“No. I guess I was lucky in some respects. Living with my grandparents might not have been ideal, but at least I had a secure home.”
Might not have been ideal. What kind of pain did those words conceal? He felt a rush of compassion for her at the same time he was deeply grateful for his own childhood—fishing trips with his brothers and Cade, hiking the mountains around here, swimming in Lake Haven.
In many respects, he had enjoyed an ideal, rosy, Norman Rockwell sort of childhood.
This inevitably drew his thoughts to Christopher next door, angry and hurting and lost, whose childhood was vastly different. His chest ached for both the boy and Andie.
“I don’t know why I told you that,” she said a moment later. “You seem to be excellent at getting me to confess things I rarely talk about. I guess that’s what makes you a good police officer.”