“What’s a Ross moment?”
“Like from Friends, the TV show. I was having a heated discussion with my girlfriend at the time, and in the middle of my apologizing to her, I said your name.” He winced a little as he confessed this to me. “It wasn’t my finest moment.”
“You said my name? How?” My expression must have looked like a mixture of confusion and shock, because that was how I felt.
“I basically said, ‘I’m so sorry, Cammie.’”
“What was her name?”
“Jill.” He swallowed before grimacing slightly.
I struggled between feeling bad for Jill and silently loving the hell out of what he’d done. Because it had been my name he’d said, not some other girl’s. And that had to mean something.
“Oh. What did she do?”
“She told me that I needed to figure out exactly who it was that I loved because she didn’t think it was her.”
I shifted on the bed, pulling one of the pillows against me. “When was that?” I asked, my eyes looking everywhere but at him.
“Three years ago.”
I shifted my gaze to his. “Three years ago?” I assumed that he was talking about something that had happened months ago, or at the longest a year. Not three.
He shrugged. “Sorry it took me so long to get here.”
I didn’t know what to say to that. In that moment, I didn’t care that it took him so long. All that mattered was that he was here now. It’s funny the little details you get hung up on when you’re missing someone . . . and then those tiny things all but fly out the window when you’re face-to-face.
“So, when did you move back from New York?”
“Almost a year ago. My partner, Tucker, and I both moved here. The case we’re working on had a change of location, and I volunteered to relocate.”
I remembered that my dad had worked the streets, always driving around in his cop car looking for the bad guys, but he never talked about working a case. “So you’re not a normal cop then?”
He half smiled. “Undercover.”
“You’re an undercover cop?” I wasn’t sure what it was about the word undercover, but it made him seem ten times hotter than just being a regular cop.
“Thanks to you,” he said, and my breath stilled.
“Thanks to me?” I all but choked out.
He shifted again, as if uncomfortable. “Cammie, you made me want to become a cop.”
“I m-made you?” I stuttered on those shocking words. “How? Why?” I had no idea at all how I could have made Dalton want to become a police officer. My mind struggled as I tried to determine what he meant.
“It was the day of your dad’s funeral,” he said, his voice so sad that my throat closed up, making it hard for me to breathe. Thinking back on that day was difficult, because it was such a blur . . .
• • •
I’d stood in the front row of the funeral home’s chapel, my mom barely able to function as she sat next to me, her eyes glazed over and her cheeks red and chapped from days of crying. She’d blown her nose as tears spilled down her face, just as they had since we found out my dad had been killed. She hadn’t taken the news well, and I’d found her in the back of her closet, buried under a pile of Dad’s clothes on more than one occasion.
As torn apart as I was, it was awful to watch my mom crumple in the wake of it all. It made me feel like I needed to be strong for both of us, but I couldn’t do it; I couldn’t even fake it. My dad had been my hero, and now he was gone. He’d never walk me down the aisle, or see me graduate from college, or anything that I had always assumed he’d be around for.
When you’re a kid, you never think about losing a parent. You need them too much and assume they’ll live forever, that they’ll always be there for you. My mom’s withdrawal from life—from me—devastated me, making me feel as if I was losing them both at once.
The sounds of soft conversation and muted grief filled the room, and when I turned around once to look behind me, I noticed that the room was completely packed with people, but I didn’t really see anyone. There were a lot of men in police uniforms, but that was the only detail I really noticed. Aside from some family members and Kristy, I had no idea who was here, although we were informed later that hundreds of people had stood outside and filled the parking lot because there wasn’t enough room for everyone inside.
It all seemed like a bad dream I desperately wanted to wake up from, but couldn’t. Kristy wrapped her arm around me, her own tears flowing. My dad was her second dad, and I knew it was a painful loss for her as well. Everything around me seemed to move in slow motion, my mind unable to process any of it. I was completely numb and out of it, going through the motions robotically because it was required of me, but not really absorbing any of it. I just wanted my dad back, and no one could ever make that happen for me. It killed me to think that I’d never be the same girl ever again.
I suddenly wondered—can you still be Daddy’s little girl if you don’t have a dad anymore?
• • •
I shook my head to rid myself of the memory and rejoined Dalton in the present. “You were there? You came to my dad’s funeral?” My eyes continued to fill and I tried my best to hold back the tears, but failed as two fell.
Dalton nodded before reaching out and wiping the tears away with his thumbs. “I don’t mean to make you sad. Please don’t cry.”