Chapter 6
SIX
JUSTIN
The house is too quiet when I push through the front door after a twelve-hour shift that left my shoulders tight and my temper already simmering under the surface.
No thin wail of a baby cutting through the stillness, no soft shuffle of bare feet across the linoleum, no low murmur of some mindless show she liked to leave running in the background just to fill the empty spaces.
The silence lands heavy, almost physical, and my hand drifts to the service weapon still holstered at my hip out of pure reflex before I force myself to unbuckle the duty belt and set it aside.
“Ainsley.”
The name comes out flat, carrying none of the patience I no longer feel like offering.
Nothing answers. I move through the living room first, eyes scanning every corner the way they do on a call, cataloguing absences instead of threats.
The kitchen sits untouched, dishes still in the sink from whatever half-assed meal she managed that morning.
The bedroom door stands open, and the second I cross the threshold the truth hits me square in the chest with enough force to steal the air from my lungs.
She’s gone.
The closet yawns empty, hangers scattered across the floor like she ripped clothes free in a hurry and never bothered to pick up after herself.
Her side of the dresser has been cleaned out down to the last pair of socks.
The diaper bag that always lived by the door is missing, and Owen’s crib sits stripped bare, mattress exposed and cold under the weak afternoon light.
My jaw locks so tight the grind of enamel against enamel echoes inside my skull.
She fucking ran. She took him. She stole my son.
Something inside my chest splits wide open, but it isn’t grief or the soft ache of loss.
It is rage, pure and white-hot, flooding every vein until my vision edges red.
She does not get to do this. She does not get to decide that what’s mine can simply walk out the door like I won’t tear the world apart to drag it back.
I move through the rest of the house with methodical precision, checking every closet, every drawer, every shadowed corner.
Her toothbrush is gone from the bathroom.
Half the baby clothes have vanished from the nursery.
The winter coat she complained was never warm enough is missing from the hall closet.
The realization settles slow and vicious: she planned this.
While I was out there keeping the city from eating itself alive, she was packing her shit and walking out with the one thing that actually mattered.
Back in the kitchen her coffee mug still sits in the sink, the stupid ceramic thing with the faded flowers she always reached for first thing in the morning.
I pick it up, turn it over in my hands, and the knowledge that she stood right here hours ago, drinking from it while she calculated how to disappear, twists something sharp beneath my ribs.
I set the mug down hard enough that a hairline crack spiderwebs across the glaze.
In the living room Owen’s soft blue blanket still drapes over the arm of the couch, and when I lift it the faint scent of baby powder and warm skin rises up to meet me.
My hands start to shake around the fabric as the rage climbs higher, hotter, demanding somewhere to go.
I storm into the bathroom, snatch the cheap floral shampoo bottle from the shower ledge, and hurl it against the far wall.
Plastic explodes. Pink liquid splatters across tile and drywall alike.
She planned this. I gave her a roof, food, clothes, a place that was supposed to mean something.
I put a son in her and built a life around the three of us, and this is how she chooses to repay every single thing I did for her.
She was impossible to please. Nothing I provided ever sat right.
I worked myself raw to keep her comfortable and she still looked at me like I was the problem, like the discipline I had to enforce was somehow my failure instead of hers.
She made me do it. If she had simply listened, if she had stopped questioning and pushing and stepping out of line, none of this would have been necessary.
She knew the consequences of lying. She knew what happened when she defied me. And she did it anyway.
The picture frames on the mantel catch my eye next, a photo of the two of us from early on, Owen as a newborn, the three of us together in the park last fall.
I lift the old photo of her and stare at the smile she wore that day, the way she looked up at me like I was everything she had ever needed.
I made her happy. I know I did. The fist I drive into the wall leaves a crater in the drywall and a bright flare of pain racing up my arm, but the pain is almost welcome.
I hit it again. And again. The rage has become something alive now, clawing for more space, more destruction.
I grab the nearest chair and send it flying; wood splinters against the far wall.
Picture frames follow, glass shattering across the floorboards in a glittering spray.
I tear through Owen’s nursery next, ripping drawers open and flinging tiny clothes across the room, kicking the soft piles, shredding fabric between my hands because she does not get to take him, because he is mine, because the empty crib is an insult I cannot swallow.
Breathing hard, I finally stop in the middle of the wreckage and the memory surfaces unbidden.
Six months ago. A long shift. Exhaustion riding me hard.
She said something, God knows what, something small and stupid that landed wrong.
I grabbed her arm harder than I meant to.
She tried to pull away, tried to run, and I shoved her into the wall hard enough that the crack of impact told me I’d done real damage.
She’d crumpled, gasping, and for a second the sight of her on the floor had put a cold weight in my gut.
The next day I bought roses, the expensive kind, and when I handed them over she looked up with those big brown eyes and smiled.
That smile told me she understood. It told me she knew I was sorry, that I hadn’t meant the worst of it, that she forgave me the way she always did.
She smiled. She understood. So why the fuck did she leave?
I stand in the middle of the destroyed nursery and force the rage down by degrees, breathing through it the way they taught us at the academy.
She’ll come home. She always does. She just needs a little time to remember where she belongs and what happens when she forgets.
I walk back into the living room and begin picking up the broken glass piece by careful piece.
I right the chair. I straighten the frames that survived.
I fold Owen’s blanket and return it to the arm of the couch exactly the way she used to leave it.
“She’ll come home,” I say into the empty air, and my voice sounds wrong in the quiet. “She always does.”
In the kitchen I wash her cracked mug, dry it with deliberate care, and set it back in the cabinet where it belongs.
Everything in its place. Everything the way it should be.
Only when I return to the bedroom and open the closet again do the empty hangers and the missing shoes and the stark gaps where her clothes used to hang force the truth back into focus.
She didn’t just leave in a moment of temper.
She packed. She planned. The rage surges up hotter and sharper than before, and I rip the remaining hangers from the rod, hurl them across the room, yank the empty drawers free and kick them until the wood splits.
I end up back in the nursery, chest heaving, hands still trembling. The rocking chair in the corner waits like it always has. I sit. The slow back-and-forth motion steadies something inside me. I look at the empty crib and feel the corners of my mouth lift.
“You’ll come home,” I tell the quiet room. “You always do.”
I keep rocking. Back and forth. Back and forth. She’ll learn. They both will. What’s mine always comes home.