The Darkest Sunrise

Guilt settled heavily in his chest. He could have ended that nightmare for Charlotte almost a decade earlier. Only he hadn’t. And it fucking corroded his soul, knowing that.

Rocking back in his chair, he sipped off the lip of a paper cup filled with coffee so strong that he probably should have chewed it. He’d gotten the call around eleven the previous night that the badly deteriorated remains of a baby had been discovered, and he had been at the station by eleven twenty. The moment he saw the filthy baby-blue-striped onesie Lucas had last been seen wearing, his stomach had dropped.

But there were a lot of little blue-striped onesies floating around the world. It was that damn pacifier clip with the boy’s name stitched into the side that had lit Tom on fire. Fuck. For as long as he’d been searching, right then, he hated with a vengeance that it had been found. Or, more accurately, that it had ever needed to be found in the first place.

He hadn’t slept a wink in the hours that had followed. He hadn’t even gone home. Instead, he’d decided to break protocol and put his girls out of their misery once and for all. He drove straight to Susan’s house, sat in his car, waited for the day to break, and prepared to crush the heart of the woman he loved. Then he was going to be forced to ask that same woman to help him deliver the news that was going to shatter her daughter.

The only comfort he could find was knowing that he could finally give both Susan and Charlotte the closure they so desperately deserved. Though it didn’t feel anything like relief as he watched Susan fall to her knees. And definitely not when he watched Charlotte slip so deeply behind her walls that he feared she would never reemerge. But, ultimately, that closure was the only consolation he was ever going to get—unless he could find the person responsible.

Lucas was gone and there was nothing he could do to change that. But his case was far from closed.

A newfound hope had exploded within him from knowing there had to have been some kind of evidence on the body. Forensics had come a long way since he’d first joined the force over thirty years earlier. He had faith that the lab would find him something to go on. And it was that same faith that had him sitting at the station, staring at his computer screen, furiously refreshing his email in hopes the report would appear.

He’d been texting Susan all afternoon, and from what she was saying, Charlotte was still very much in denial. The silver lining being that it seemed she had finally found a man who could handle her with the care she deserved. Charlotte hadn’t shared with Tom or her mother that she and Porter had rekindled whatever connection they’d witnessed that night at The Porterhouse. But, from seeing the way she clung to him as if he could magically solve the world of hurt Tom had dropped at her feet, it was clear they had definitely rekindled something serious.

“Hey, Tom!” Charlie Boucher, his longtime partner, called in a thick New York accent, a stark contrast to the good ol’ Southern boys who made up over ninety percent of the department.

Tom turned and found him striding toward him from across the room, a manila envelope in his hand lifted in the air.

Shooting to his feet, Tom lurched toward him. “That my results?”

Charlie shrugged. “Picked ’em up at the lab. We got good news and bad. And, because the world is a seriously fucked-up place, they’re both the same thing.”

Tom snatched the envelope and tore into it, blood thundering in his ears.

Charlie dropped his ass into the chair next to Tom’s desk, kicked his feet out in front of him, and announced, “It’s not Lucas Boyd.”

* * *

“Where are we going?” I asked Porter as he drove my car down the quiet roads on the outskirts of the city.

He had the windows down, the radio off, and his hand latched onto my thigh. The warm April air whipped through the car, but I was too numb to feel it.

If I didn’t specifically think about the fact that Lucas was gone, it was really no different than any other day. He’d been gone for years. It wasn’t as if someone had snatched him from my arms that morning. Or so I’d convinced myself as the gut-wrenching pain of Tom’s announcement had buckled my knees.

I’d shut down, and it had been a conscious decision. Just as it had been the first week after Lucas had gone missing when I went back to school. I wasn’t built to handle that kind of emotional upheaval.

The emptiness was easier.

And that’s saying something because the emptiness was agonizing.

“We’re here,” Porter replied in a grim tone.

“Uh…” I glanced around at the road as he pulled onto the shoulder. And then my heart stopped when he put my car in park at the foot of a small concrete bridge that looked a lot like an overpass, but instead of a highway, it straddled the Chattahoochee River.

“This is where it started,” he said stiffly as his hand clamped down on my leg surprisingly tight, his face etched with panic. He lifted a finger and pointed out the windshield. “I watched her drive through that guardrail, not even so much as a brake light as warning.”

“Oh God,” I gasped, covering his hand with mine.

A few cars zipped past us from opposite directions, the sounds of their engines unable to drown out the tremendous ache in his whispers as he confessed, “I’ve never come back. In the three years she’s been gone, I’ve never come back here.”

“Of course not,” I breathed, squeezing his hand tight. “Why would you?”

His blue gaze cut to me. “Because this is where it started.” He pulled his hand away and opened his door, pushing it wide before finishing with, “And this is where it needs to end.”

I’d been wrong before. That was when my heart stopped.

“Porter!” I yelled, scrambling out after him, fear icing my veins. I watched in horror as he climbed the guardrail and then started down the embankment. “Porter, stop!” I screamed, slinging my leg over the hot metal, bile creeping up my throat.

And praise God, he actually listened.

Turning to face me, he looked at me like I was crazy. “What?”

“What?” I screamed back at him, incredulous, the first tears of the day hitting the backs of my eyes. “What the fuck are you doing?”

“Going for a swim,” he answered—again, like I was the crazy person.

Blinking, I gave myself a minute to consider the possibility that I really was the crazy person, because absolutely nothing was making sense. After I took inventory of the situation and decided I was not, in fact, having a nervous breakdown, I asked, “Are you having a nervous breakdown?”

“Not that I’m aware of,” he replied evenly. So evenly that I figured it meant he absolutely was having a nervous breakdown.

I got my feet back on the ground on his side of the guardrail and curled a finger in his direction. “Porter, baby,” I said softly. “Come here. You’re not going for a swim. That water is gross and there are probably alligators or, at the very least, snakes,” I guessed.

He cocked his head to the side but thankfully took several steps toward me. “I know it’s gross, Charlotte. I’ve been living with that filth on me for the last three years. I’m ready to get rid of it.”

“You can’t—”

“I can,” he stated definitively. “I’m so fucking sick and tired of living with this shit. I hate her for killing herself and trying to take my kids with her. But that’s on her. I can’t change that. The only thing I can change is how I feel about what happened. I’ve spent a lot of years feeling guilty for failing her.”

My breath caught, and my throat started to burn. God, did I know that feeling.

It was the one wound that would never heal.

“Porter, you didn’t fail her.”

His lips thinned, and he nodded sadly. “I did. I really did. I should have seen it coming. I knew she’d been struggling, but I didn’t realize it had gotten that bad. We’d been dealing with Travis’s health issues for as long as I could remember, and she was always so fucking optimistic about everything, but the day they finally told us he was going to need a heart transplant, she couldn’t handle it.”

I’d lied. Twice. That was the moment my heart stopped.