And instead, I shouted at him. Fuck.
It was my turn to rub a hand over my face. “Even if he meant to ask you beforehand, I was so pissed at him for working with Ariel to set this up,” I said. “He couldn’t know how things were before, though.”
“No,” Hal agreed. “All he saw were my little girls hurting and a way that he thought he could make it better. And he and Ariel have been friends ever since I started dating her. I’m not surprised he wanted to give her the benefit of a doubt.” He sighed. “I could have done that better myself.”
“Hal, no—”
“She’s been fighting depression for years, Nicky.” Hal crossed his arms, gripping his biceps hard enough the skin blanched. “She’d get treatment for a while, take pills for a while, maybe get better for a while, but these things aren’t simple. Right? You know that better than me.”
“Yeah. I know that.” I had my own treatment plan from the Veteran’s Administration for my PTSD, and I was required to keep at it in order to keep my job with the force. Hell, I’d relied on it just last night to help get me home. There had been no one to follow up on Ariel except herself…and Hal. And he hadn’t, or at least figured he hadn’t done enough of it. “She still didn’t have to leave.”
“She made a mistake,” Hal said tiredly. “One that I’m not sure I can ever forgive her for, but she made my girls happy today, and I reckon that means I’ve gotta work with her limits. For now, at least. I talked to her at the end of the call, and she said she’d try.” He shrugged. “It’s the most civil conversation we’ve had in two months, so I’m taking it as a win. And now,” he pointed toward the darkening sky, “we need to get Max back home.”
“We can’t call him.” He’d left his phone here, and it had been buzzing with messages for the past few hours, until I finally turned it off. I didn’t have a spare phone in the Jeep…
I snapped my fingers. “LoJack.” I got out my phone and pulled up the number for the precinct. “I’ve got LoJack. I’ll have the desk sergeant look him up.”
Hal visibly relaxed. “Great idea. I don’t want to have to explain to the girls why Max isn’t home in time for dinner.”
I didn’t, either. Guilt pooled in my gut, taking away my appetite and replacing it with pulsing anxiety. I needed to find Max. I needed to explain, to tell him I was sorry for how I’d acted earlier.
“Martie?” I said as soon as she picked up. “I need a favor, and I will owe you big-time for this. I need you to access the LoJack on my car and tell me where it is.”
There was a long pause. “Did you get drunk and drive it into a field or something?” she asked. “Or has it been stolen?”
“Neither. It’s with a friend, but he’s been out a long time, and I want to make sure that—”
“Oh, wait, is this about Max?” She laughed. “Why didn’t you say so, Nicky? Yeah, let me look you up. Hang on a minute.”
A few minutes later, I had a location: Barton Park Trailhead. What the hell was he doing at a trailhead this late in the afternoon? “He’s not hiking, right? He wouldn’t go hiking in the snow, in the park with moose and bear and cougars, at night, right?”
“Let’s hope not,” Hal said, which wasn’t as reassuring as I was looking for. “Look, I’m gonna see if Phee can watch the girls a little longer. I’ll come with you and—”
“That’s just going to make them nervous,” I pointed out. “I’ll go. If I can’t find him in half an hour, I’ll call you and we can get a search team mobilized.”
I was dead serious about that, too. If something had happened to Max, if he’d gone off into the woods and fallen down and broken a leg or something, if he was lying there in the snow right now, freezing to death…
“I’m going.”
It took fifteen minutes to drive to the trailhead—nothing really took more than fifteen minutes to drive to in any single direction in Edgewood. There was only one car there, a very familiar Jeep with nobody inside of it.
I got out of the truck, turned on my flashlight, and immediately started calling. “Max,” I shouted, heading for the trail. There was a single fresh set of footprints in the snow.
“Max!”
I used the flashlight to follow his path, calling his name and getting no response. My heart was racing, and I struggled to keep my breath under control. How far had he gone? Why wasn’t he answering? Did he not hear me or could he not respond?
“Max!” I roared.
“D-Dominic?”
I looked up from the ground, where I’d been focusing all my attention on footprints.
Max was standing a few yards away on top of a boulder at the edge of a clearing. His clothes were covered in snow, like he’d been there a while, not moving.
My heart leaped, and I bit my tongue for a long moment to keep myself from begging him to come down or, worse, shouting at him for scaring the shit out of me.
“Max,” I said raggedly once I had control of myself, more or less. “Are you okay?”
He looked like he was frowning under his hat. “Yeah, I’m fine. What’s wrong?” He got down off the boulder and walked over to me.
“What’s…Max, you’ve been gone all day.” I couldn’t help myself—I reached out and grabbed his arm, needing the contact. “I didn’t mean for you to leave like that,” I said, absolutely sincere. “I really didn’t. I was just upset, and I thought Hal was out back having a crisis, and I panicked, but I shouldn’t have made you feel like you needed to go.” I shivered, and I didn’t think it was from the cold. “You only did what you thought was right.”
“But it wasn’t right,” Max said, unduly gently. “It was presumptuous of me. I’m not a family member, and I wasn’t here for the worst of it, and—”
“Don’t say that—you are family,” I said, my whole chest aching like I’d just been kicked. “You are, and you deserve to be with us. We want you there, all of us, whether we’re arguing or not. The second you stepped out the door, I felt like—like I might—”
The words tangled on my tongue.
“Max,” I said softly, squeezing his arm. Please don’t walk away from me. “Please.”
Max’s nose and cheeks were bright red from too long out in the cold. His lips were chapped, his eyes were a little puffy, and his hair was probably as flat as a pancake under that hat of his. He was still the best thing I’d ever seen. I wanted to pull him into my arms and tell him that, hold him close and spill my soul out to him, tell him that I knew I’d made a mistake but I could learn from it, that I’d rather he never left again, not like this morning, not at all.