Page 79 of Finding Noah

“Maybe,” I said, but I wasn't sure I was convinced.

He hadn't seemed guilty, not at all panicked.

And I didn't know for sure that he'd killed that kid, did I? I hadn't seen anything. Most of what I thought I knew was built entirely on assumptions, a six-year-old brain fitting jagged pieces of a messy puzzle together. For all I knew, he'd killed Tommy, and—

“What if Tommy had been his first kill?”

Meg's fingers stalled in their lazy circuit.

“And what if he was important to someone?” I went on, staring at the blank ceiling we couldn't decide what color to paint. “What if he … what if he wasn’t supposed to kill him? I mean, he'd only fired his gun to …”

My voice trailed off, and my jaw dropped as something very sudden and somehow critical hit me out of nowhere.

“He was protecting me,” I stated. “That kid … he was choking me. He was going to kill me. And Seth … he pulled him off. He threw him into the corner. The kid was already hurt. He could've left it alone, we could've gotten out of there, but he didn't. He told me to get out, he told me to leave, and then he fired the gun. He didn't want me to see it happen. He …”

“What if he was protecting you from more than just that kid?”

“He kept telling Tommy not to look at me,” I went on absent-mindedly. “Holy fuck, what if it means something? God, Meg, this is what I'm talking about. I can't … fuck, I can't turn this off. I can't just live with this and go on like it never happened. It's like a part of me is moving forward—buying a house, getting married, having kids—while another part of me is still … back there. Wondering why. Wondering when the fuck Seth is gonna walk through the door and put a bullet between my eyes.”

“Baby, maybe you should … I don't know … maybe you need to talk to someone. I mean, not just me. Maybe a doctor. Maybe …”

I narrowed my eyes and asked, “What?”

She swallowed; she hesitated, like she didn't want to finish the sentence but knew she had to. She'd already started.

“Maybe … you need to figure out what happened,” she said slowly, getting each word out with cautious intent. “Maybe, Detective, you need to finish the puzzle and then lay it to rest.”

“This is why I’m becoming a detective,” I replied, licking my dry lips. “To stop the bad guys and to solve mysteries and—”

“I know,” she said, reaching up to caress my cheek. “And if solving this one will help you to move on, then I think you should do it.”

“Really?”

She nodded. “Yeah, I do. But, baby, if you do solve it and you still can't put it behind you, then—”

“Then I'll talk to a doctor,” I agreed, turning to press a kiss to her forehead while my thoughts traveled a mile a minute.

Thinking, thinking, thinking about my first steps, about the first person I was going to reach out to.

Because I realized I’d been wrong about one thing.

Someone had loved Seth.

For whatever it was worth, he had mattered to one lone person in this world.

Levi Stratton.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

SHITTY COFFEE & CLUES

An interesting tidbit to know about Dad and me was that, if you were to study our genealogical chart, you'd see that we were, in fact, relatives.

His father, David Stratton—whom he had never met—was cousins with my biological father, making Soldier Mason and me second cousins.

Of course, we hadn't known this when we met. At that point, Soldier hadn't been aware of who his dad was or that Levi—David's brother—or Seth were at all related to him. But when we'd figured it out and put the pieces of our messy family tree together, we'd been amused to find out that we did actually share blood … just not in the way that I would've wished for.

It didn't matter though. None of it did—ever. He was my father, I was his son, and that was all there was to it.