She walked forward, and, taking them from his hand, moved to spread them over her neatly made bed.
Jacob left her to it and started changing, pulling on his jeans and a tee-shirt in a hurry so that he could avoid being semi-dressed around her. The thought of having any excuse to feel her bare skin against him resulted in the quickest change in human history, and in under a minute, he moved to where she stood, fully dressed—including shoes.
“Recognize any of them?”
She looked up at him, a look of complete devastation in her eyes. “These could be any women in a cafe, or on the sidewalk.”
He didn’t say anything, needed her to focus on the pictures free of suggestion to be able to take her word as reliable. He couldn’t influence her at all.
After another minute, she reached forward and picked up the picture of Selma Holt. “I know this girl,” she said. “I just…saw her the other day. She was with her friends at the diner and…we walked out together…”
She took the photo to her easel and laid it on a dry corner of the Mohave Desert scene, then took a solid step back and stared at it.
Jacob didn’t move.
He didn’t say anything.
She turned to him slowly, her eyes huge and filled with tears. “She worked in my local grocery store on Glendale Boulevard. When I recognized her at the diner…I said hi and…we walked out together.”
“Did she recognize you?” He didn’t doubt that she knew Selma Holt, but what were the chances that someone with a job like Selma’s remembered everyone she spoke to in a day.
“Yes. I spoke to her a few times. But the first time we met, we had a full conversation right in the aisle of the store. I remember because Sarah and I stopped her to tell her how jealous we were of her hair, all those gorgeous, dark locks, while we were stuck with the springs and copper tresses.” She raised a hand to touch her hair as if she were remembering the scene. “What a stupid thing to judge a woman by.”
“Her name was Selma Holt,” he said. “She was a night manager at the store but worked a day job too, so she could support her ten-year-old.”
Lola turned to him and Jacob hated the complete despair that he had put in her eyes. “What?”
He nodded. “Jordan Holt, Selma’s son, is the one we’re going to see today.”
She raised a hand to her mouth as tears filled her eyes. When he took a solid step towards her, she didn’t move away or flinch, instead, she just stepped into his chest. His arms came around her instinctively, in a gesture of comfort that he would have offered to anyone. But the rapid pat, pat, pat of his heart was only for her, only for the sadness that he felt at having opened that small dark corner of the world to her.
He held her in his arms as she cried for a woman she had barely known, for a child she would meet later in the day. She felt so tiny and slight in his arms, and Jacob wondered if that was why he felt so protective of her.
A small part of him also wondered if her reaction was so visceral because she too knew what it was to be alone in the world. Sure, she hadn’t been ten, but there was perhaps something scarier about being alone as a legal adult. Nobody took care of orphaned eighteen-year-olds, especially the ones that had been cut off by their angry parents.
He rubbed her back, using his wide palm to trace big circles over the cotton cami that she was wearing. He didn’t move or try to give her words of comfort because, well, he couldn’t. There was nothing at that moment that he could think to say that would make what lay ahead of them any easier and he knew that she was better off if she was prepared for that eventuality.
Best case scenario, Jordan Holt could tell them something that might make the interview easier to bear.
As he held her, he breathed in her lilac scent and thought about how he would even begin to ask a ten-year-old trigger questions, questions that might help him remember a single detail that could help with the case. A part of him wondered if the interview was even necessary at all, or if he should just spare the child altogether.
After five minutes, Lola took a step back from him, leaving a cold patch on his shirt where her tears had fallen. She swiped furiously at her eyes. Reaching for her hand, Jacob asked, “Are you okay?”
She nodded, her eyes red and puffy. “I’m sorry.” She rested her forehead in her palm for a brief moment. “I don’t know what got into me. I…”
“Don’t apologize,” he said, feeling angry that she felt self-conscious about being vulnerable around him. “It’s a terrible situation.” When she looked at him, a small smile on her lips, he gave her hand a subtle squeeze.
“I bet she regrets her choices every day.”
For a moment he thought that she was talking about Selma Holt, and he frowned as he tried to piece together the context of their previous conversation.
“Your ex-wife,” she clarified, her eyes lit with amusement at his obvious confusion. When he looked up at her in surprise, she reached her free hand out and brushed it over his hair. “She didn’t know what she had.”
He felt his stomach clench uncomfortably and had to avert his gaze from hers. “It’s never one-sided,” he said, quietly.
The truth was that he avoided thinking about his ex in general because doing so made him feel a shit-ton of guilt for how he’d behaved towards the end. “We were both so miserable those last few years that I wasn’t the best husband to her.” The words were hard to admit, and he wondered if it was because he had never said them aloud to anyone, or if he didn’t want Lola to know that he had failed. “When things got bad, I threw myself into my work, took extra shifts just so that I didn’t have to go home and hear about how much I worked, how much I was gone…how terrible a husband I was.”
“That can’t have been easy.”
He shook his head. “You know,” he chuckled, “on the day that she told me that she wanted a divorce, I was the happiest I think I’d ever been. It was like this permanent anchor had been cut loose. I know it sounds terrible to say, but it—”
“Freed you.”
He pulled himself back from his memories to remember that she had lost those closest to her in a very different but also somehow similar way. “Have you spoken to your parents recently?”
The question, although about her, was purely selfish. He had told her so much about himself already because she always listened. But he didn’t know that much about her—at least not when compared to how much she knew about him. She knew everything about him, including the names of his siblings, their careers even, he realized, their personalities.
He wondered if his siblings would like her, then dismissed the thought instantly. The Simmones would interrogate her, stifle her, and generally ply her with attention until she was begging to leave. Probably best to wait before introducing her to the family, he realized. He didn’t want to scare her away.
She sighed and although she never walked away, he could feel the barrier that she had erected around herself as if it were a physical thing. He could tell by the way her eyes glazed over that she hadn’t cut him out deliberately, that it was just her defense mechanism. “I spoke to my mother yesterday. They want to come out and visit.”
“And?”
“I said that now wasn’t a good time with work, but that I’d let them know in a few weeks.”