A/N: If you are reading this the day I posted it, make sure you have read chapter 13. I posted the final three chapters in the same day.
I spent the first three days home sleeping in the recliner on the couch. It was more comfortable on the incision than my bed, but it also meant I was sleeping alone. One of the things I had been looking forward to the most about my trip to Indiana was feeling Stephanie in bed next to me. I had never minded sleeping alone until after we had been together. It wasn't even about the sex, though that was a bonus. Sleeping had felt vulnerable to me ever since I had gotten out of the Army, but the sensation of a person I loved and trusted in bed next to me had made me feel safe and loved, and I had missed that ever since she left. By Sunday night, I was willing to sacrifice physical comfort for the emotional kind.
Stephanie had retrieved extra pillows from the guest bedroom and helped me get positioned as comfortably as possible. I knew it wouldn't be as restful as the recliner, but I would get to touch her and hear her breathing, which would make me more relaxed even if I didn't sleep.
"Is there anything else I can do?" she asked after making sure I had a bottle of water, pain pills, phone, and iPad all within easy reach on my nightstand.
"You could sit on my face," I suggested. She made a disgusted noise and rolled her eyes.
"You just had surgery six days ago. You aren't supposed to be thinking about sex."
"They took out my appendix, not my tongue."
"I don't care," she said as she climbed into bed next to me. "It's not happening."
I had known very well that it wouldn't, but I loved teasing her about sex. She had never been able to shake the Catholic shame the way I had. I always enjoyed making her blush when we were in bed together with suggestions of the things I wanted to do with her. She was always very engaged and enthusiastic in the act but couldn't bear to actually talk about it.
"I saw Morelli at Pino's today," she told me as she turned over on her side to face me.
"How did that go?" I asked, trying to recall the last time I had seen Morelli. It had been at least three years.
"Not bad I guess, once I realized he wasn't going to come over and throw me through the window."
"Did you really expect that?"
She thought about it for a minute. "I guess in my head I always thought that if I ran into him, he would give me shit about you, about running away from Trenton, and try to make me see what I had missed out on with him."
"Did he do any of those things?" I asked.
She shook her head. "He didn't even get up from his table. He was there with a woman and a little boy. I assume that was his wife and son. She was about twelve months pregnant. She looked like she could barely fit in the booth and if anyone accidentally bumped her, she would pop. He saw me waiting at the to-go counter. He looked a little surprised but just kind of nodded at me and that was it."
"I knew he was married with a kid, but that's about it," I told her. "He got promoted to sergeant a couple of years after you left Trenton, so he sits behind a desk most of the time now."
She was quiet after that. I knew one of the many reasons she had resisted coming home was because she was afraid of Morelli's behavior towards her. But it had been six years since they had broken up and she had spent almost five of those years out of state. That was a lot time and distance for him to move on and get past his resentment. In the handful of times I had seen him after she had called off their wedding, his behavior towards me had gone from outright hostility during the time she and I had been together to casual indifference the last time I saw two years after she had left Trenton. I hadn't expected him to be antagonistic towards her after all this time, but she had needed to see that for herself.
Would she be able to face the fears she had about coming back to Trenton while she was here? And would it be enough to bring her home once she saw that things likely weren't as bad as she had built them up to be? There was no reason she had to be in the Burg regularly if she lived here. We were in Hamilton Township and my office was downtown. She had been the one who wanted Pino's for dinner. Since I couldn't drive and we were outside of their delivery range she had been forced to go pick it up. But she had made that choice to go there. She had also been there the day before to visit Connie. Stephanie had come back from that visit smiling, having spent much of her day laughing with her old friend. Connie was currently pregnant with her fifth child and miserable about it. She had been four months pregnant with her first child at her wedding and had been pregnant every year since then including a set of twins. She had told her husband that she didn't give a damn what the Pope thought and that his options were either getting a vasectomy or a mistress. Her husband had known that if he got a mistress his final resting place would have been the Trenton landfill, so he had opted for the vasectomy.
"I asked Connie if she had talked to Lula recently, but she said she hasn't heard from her in about four years. I guess she moved to Philadelphia with some guy she met. Do you care if I use your programs to look her up?"
"Of course not," I said. I reached over and grabbed my iPad. "In fact, I can do it from here."
I typed in Lula's name, date of birth, and last known location and waited for the results to populate. While the system looked for her, Stella came into the room and asked for a drink. Stephanie headed out to help her. The results for Lula arrived before she came back, and after a quick look I dreaded giving her the news.
"Okay, she's back to sleep," Stephanie announced a few minutes later. "Did you get anything on Lula yet?"
I nodded and handed her the iPad. I watched her closely as she took in the information.
"I'm sorry," I told her as tears began to fall down her face. She leaned over and put her head on my shoulder and I wrapped my arm around her.
Lula's background check showed she had moved to Philadelphia three-and-a-half years ago with a man named Diego Torres. Within six months of her move she had been diagnosed with cervical cancer. Her death certificate listed that as her cause of death two years later.
"I didn't think anything could kill Lula," Stephanie whispered. "She had been through so much. I thought she would outlive all of us."
I had to agree. I had pegged Lula to take over for Edna Mazur as the hell-raising senior citizen of Trenton one day. I promised Stephanie that we would visit Lula's grave as soon as I was able.
She tried to go to sleep after that, but I knew she was restless thinking about Lula. The talk about Lula had gotten me to think about Tank and the few months the two had been together. I had never understood it, especially when she had tricked him into getting engaged. He had very briefly considered marrying her just because he was intimidated by her. Thankfully, I had promised to protect him and convinced him that Stephanie could talk some sense into her friend so that he hadn't gone through with it. I was convinced he had collected more cats after they broke up to prevent her from ever coming back. I needed to talk to him, and there was no point in putting it off. He wasn't going to change his mind about Stephanie, but that didn't have to stop me from apologizing to him for my own stuff.
"Are you sure you don't want to come with me?" Stephanie asked me for the thirtieth time that morning as she helped Stella get her coat on.
"I'm sure," I told her. "I have a tube sticking out of my body collecting fluid. Besides, I think this is something you need to do on your own. All the kids will be a good buffer and Valerie will be there to mediate if you need it."
Stephanie was going to her mother's house that morning. Helen had called her on Saturday and Stephanie had answered the phone for the first time. She told her mother she was in town, and they arranged the visit. She was clearly nervous and hadn't been able to sleep last night. This was her worst anxiety about being in Trenton. Valerie had known about the visit and decided to come over with her kids at the same time so that Stephanie wouldn't have to be alone with Helen. I'd been surprised to learn that she was living on her own in an apartment after breaking up with her boyfriend back in the spring.
"Okay," she said. "Do you need anything?"
"I asked Tank to come over this morning so we can review some applications together for new hires," I told her. "If I need something, I'll ask him."
Tank pulled into the driveway half an hour after Stephanie left. I hadn't wanted them to run into each other in passing, so I had put in a time buffer to prevent that. I got up to let him in and showed him to the living room.
"How are you doing?" he asked as we sat down in the living room.
"Not too bad. I get the drain out next week. Hopefully I'll be able to get into the after that," I replied.
He set down a stack of folders filled with the applications and basic background checks of each person. We didn't put in the effort of a more in-depth background check unless they had gone through the first interview and we felt they had the potential for the job. I acknowledged the stack of files but didn't reach for one yet. I wanted to get the important stuff out of the way first.
"Before we get started on this, I need to talk to you about something," I said.
Tank looked surprised but set his iPad down on the table in front of him. "Okay, what's up?"
"I need to tell you I'm sorry," I said, feeling very awkward at having this conversation with him. Opening up to Stephanie had become much easier in the last few months, but it wasn't a skill I had been practicing much with anyone else. "I haven't been a very good friend to you the last few years, and this past year in particular. I've been focused on my own life and haven't checked in on yours. And I know you don't like that Stephanie and I are back together because you don't trust that she isn't going to hurt me again. I appreciate the concern, even if I think it isn't needed."
Tank had once passed out when Stephanie had talked to him about Lula's ideas for their wedding. I hadn't been there when he had collapsed but had dragged him up off the floor. I was concerned for a few seconds that he might actually pass out in my living room.
"Um, thanks," he said after a minute. "I know you've had a lot going on."
"So how are things in your life?" I asked. We took a couple of minutes to get caught up. We were men, after all. It didn't need to be a long process. Tank had started dating a woman he met on Tinder a few weeks ago. She was real estate agent and was helping him look for a house to buy. His aging parents were doing as well as they could. He had just spent the Thanksgiving holiday with his parents and had been surprised to see how much difficulty his mother was having getting around. Even though Tank was only thirty-six, his parents were both in their early eighties. They had never been able to have children in their first twenty years of marriage and had been shocked to find themselves expecting what would be their only child in their mid-forties.
"Do you need to go down there?" I asked him. "God knows you're owed plenty of time off."
Tank shrugged. "They both seem to think they're doing well enough, but I think it's denial. No one wants to get old and not be able to take care of themselves. But I did ask them about moving up here. They said they would consider it if they could get a small apartment in a nice area. They seem to think all of Trenton is like Stark Street. Mindy is helping me look around for them."
"Well if you do need to go there, don't hesitate to take the time. Darren seems to be doing pretty well at handling things when we need him."
"How are things going with Stephanie being here?" he asked tentatively.
"Really good," I told him. "It's nice to have her here, and she's actually been out in the Burg more than I thought she would be. She ran into Morelli at Pino's last night and it didn't go as badly as she thought. She caught up with Connie the other day. She's over at her mother's house with Stella and her sister now. I'm hoping she'll realize that things aren't so bad here and decide to stay."
Tank nodded without comment. I knew what he was thinking but didn't push him on it.
"She wanted to look up Lula last night, so we ran her through the system. Found out she died last year from cancer."
"Seriously?" Tank said, looking shocked. "Damn, that's sad. I mean, not that I had any feelings left for her, but that's still young to die."
I nodded and gave Tank a moment to process the information before we started looking through the applications.
We currently had seventeen open positions company-wide, which was unusually high for us, but we had experienced a sudden rash of people quitting or being terminated. Thirteen spots were field positions and the other four were administrative. Six of the field positions and one administrative post were in Trenton. The hiring process for Rangeman involved posting the available positions online and if the same position was available in multiple locations the applicants had the ability to select as many desired locations as they wanted. Some people were looking to relocate closer to family and wanted specific cities, whereas others were looking to go anywhere that wasn't their current home. The applications initially went through Human Resources, who sorted out people automatically not qualified for the job based on being too young or having arrests or convictions for certain crimes before sending the files up to us for the initial background checks. I was willing to hire some people with felonies on their record but didn't allow anyone with a history of sexual misconduct of any kind. When I did hire someone with a record, I always made it very clear that I was one of the few employers out there willing to give them a chance at a good-paying job with a lot of responsibility. If they fucked up and took advantage of that or if they harmed a coworker or a client, then they would have to answer to me, and none of them had wanted that so far.
I had been forced to fire two guys from the Trenton office the week before my surgery when they had been busted having a three-way with the wife of one of our highest-paying clients. She had set off the alarm to get them out there because she had met them before and knew they covered her area. She had answered the door naked and invited them in for some fun. Thinking they wouldn't get caught, they had called in that it had been a false alarm and that they'd be on their lunch breaks. None of them had anticipated that the husband had also wanted to use his lunch break to come home and sleep with his wife, so he had walked in on them going at it. It had taken me four hours of talking to him to keep him on as a client, with the promise of firing the two men who had been fucking his wife and a twenty-percent discount on his fees for the next two years. He still wasn't happy with me and had called twice to ask why he should keep us on for both his residential and commercial accounts, but I didn't take his threats too seriously. He probably needed an outlet for his anger over the fact that his wife had left him the same day he found her in bed with my employees, saying in front of myself, Tank, and the other two men that she needed a bigger dick attached to a smaller ego than he could offer.
"We really need to get more women in the company," I said with that in mind as we went through the files. "There are over seventy applications here; fifteen are women and all but two of them are for administrative positions. We don't have any women in the field in Trenton or Boston. Ella is the only woman in the Trenton office, and Boston has Cindy Jones in billing."
"You're the picky one," Tank informed me as he threw a file into the pile we had designated as maybe getting an interview. "You used to think women would be distracting for the men, especially after the fiasco in Miami. Remember Shelly?"
"I remember," I said. "But I've also learned that I'm a bit of a male chauvinist and I'm trying to change that. If the men can't keep their minds on their job by the fact that a woman is in their vicinity, then that's their problem and they need to fix it. It shouldn't stop us from hiring women for field work."
Tank's head shot up and he looked around suddenly.
"What?" I asked, thinking someone was about to break in my house. My guns were locked up in the safe in the closet.
"Oh, nothing. I just thought I heard Stephanie's voice coming out of your mouth and wondered where she was," he said, fighting a smile. I gave him the finger.
We spent the remainder of the morning going through the applications and deciding which ones to interview. We didn't like having a maybe pile and by noon had been able to get everyone in it sorted into whether they would get an interview or be put into the pool of people to review if all the initial people turned out to duds. Initial interviews were completed by the respective branch managers for applicants wanting their specific city. The people open to multiple locations were usually run through Trenton, then referred out to whatever branch we determined would be best suited for them for the secondary interviews once deeper background checks were completed. I always completed the final interviews with anyone who had made it through the first two rounds.
"I'll get started on these interviews," Tank said as he collected the files. He had about twenty interviews to complete on his end, with each of the other offices having an average of eight. He left and it felt like we were on better terms than we had been in a long time.
I took a pain pill and got up to see what there was for lunch. Stephanie had been at her mother's house for nearly four hours, so I hoped that meant things were going well. The visit with my own parents on Friday had gone well, even though I still felt a little betrayed by my mother. I ate a sandwich and did work on my computer since Stephanie wasn't around to yell at me to rest. I eventually fell asleep and didn't wake up until I heard the unmistakable noise of Stella running through the house.
"How did it go?" I asked Stephanie when she got to the living room.
"Pretty good, actually," she said, seeming slightly stunned by it. She sat down on the couch next to me. "She apologized right away and told me how much she had missed me. She admitted that she had been wrong to always try to make me into what she thought I should be instead of letting me be who I was. She told us about how unhappy she had been married to my father and that it had only gotten worse once we were grown and not there to be distractions. I can't believe I never saw it but looking back I guess it was all part of what I thought was acceptable in a marriage."
She went into greater detail about her family as Stella searched the house for the cats. Valerie and Albert were doing well and sounded very happy together. Helen had broken up with Paul Giancarlo after discovering he had another girlfriend in Cherry Hill. Valerie had quietly told Stephanie while Helen prepared lunch that Frank had proposed to Cynthia the week before and they were planning to get married in March.
"Are you going to call him?"
"Yeah, I will," she said. "I don't know how to ask him about why he didn't stand up for me with her. That's something I've been talking about a lot with Dr. Bader. I don't hate him, but there's resentment."
"You would have been surprised at how he stood up to your mother when they were in Indiana. She was tearing me apart and I told her if she was going be asshole then she wouldn't be allowed to see Stella. He wasn't willing to lose access to her because of your mother and put her in her place."
"Wow," Stephanie said. I had told her about that in the hospital but given everything she had been going through it seemed she hadn't remembered it. "Maybe he's changed too."
I told her about how things had gone with Tank and we spent the evening relaxing together. We watched a movie and she made fajitas for dinner. Once she had gotten Stella bathed and to bed, she came to the living room with a bottle of wine and two glasses.
"Are you trying to kill me?" I asked her, pointing to the bottle of pain pills.
"You were just saying you're about due for a pill. Skip it and have some wine instead," she said, pouring me a glass. "It's your favorite."
It was my favorite, and the idea of sitting on the couch with her in front of the fireplace drinking wine sounded better than anything else I could do at the moment. She curled up next to me with her glass of wine and we sat in comfortable silence for a few minutes.
"Do you ever think about having another baby?" she asked. I had been so comfortable sitting there with her that I thought I had fallen asleep and was dreaming for a second.
"Um, what?"
She shifted so she could see me better. "I've been thinking about it lately. You told me once that you had missed out on the birth of both of girls and all those first things like steps and words. It got me thinking that maybe we could have another one. So you could have all of those experiences."
I had been more focused on trying to get Stephanie to come back to Trenton. I hadn't been thinking that far into the future. When I thought about it, I hadn't even considered it a possibility.
"Are you sure that's a good idea?" I asked. "You've been through a lot. Pregnancy is hard on the body, and your body went through hell. Wouldn't you have to go off your medications while you were pregnant?"
"I asked my doctor about that at my visit a couple of weeks ago when I went in to get on birth control," she said. "Just because I didn't even want to bring it up if it wasn't possible. She told me that the antidepressant I'm on is probably one of the safest while pregnant. She told me it was ultimately my choice what I did, but didn't recommend I go off of it because the hormones could mess with my depression. She said the risks were small, usually more like an increased chance of premature birth or I'd gain a bunch of weight, but nothing like birth defects. She said the medication I take for my attention span could be something I put off if I was pregnant, but if I felt like I needed something she could switch me to another one that had a little more research into it. It also had some risks, but she said they were still fairly low."
If I hadn't seen the struggles she had been through in the last year, I would have jumped at the chance to have another child with her. I would have had her in the bedroom to work on getting pregnant that night regardless of my own physical condition. But I had seen the toll her accident had taken on her both physically and mentally. I didn't know if it was wise to put her through pregnancy and the exhausting days of having a newborn. I knew the days when she didn't take the medication for her attention span because she was scattered and forgetful if given too much to do, often short and snapped at anyone who distracted her when she was trying to focus.
"I don't know," I said. "It seems like a lot to put on you. I'd love to have another child with you, but not at the expense of your physical or mental wellbeing. Besides, we don't even live in the same city right now. It seems premature to even have that discussion."
"I just wanted to put it out there," she said, but I could detect disappointment in her tone. "I know it's not something we can do right now, but I'm thirty-seven and time is ticking away on that clock. If it's something we want, it'll have to happen in the next few years."
I gave a minute for the air to clear before I pursued my own line of questioning. "Where are you at with our living situation?" I asked. "Do you think there's a chance of you coming back?"
"I knew the minute I got in the car to drive out here last week that if I could do that, then I could come here to stay," she said. "Maybe not right away, but I knew it was a possibility for one day. But I've seen my mother and run into a few people from the Burg and things have gone well. It hasn't been at all what I thought it would be. It was like Trenton was frozen in time in my head. But people move on, even if you aren't around to see it. My life isn't the focus of anyone's attention. I think I was being a little arrogant to believe people cared that much."
"The people who matter care about your life," I pointed out. "The ones that didn't matter just grab onto whatever helps distract from their own problems in the moment and move on when it gets boring. You won't be a source of gossip anymore because you aren't the person you were back then. Your life is different now. We don't live in the Burg and you don't have to be there unless you want to be. You aren't going to be desperate for money and having to eat meals with your family or borrow the car. You won't have people breaking into your home or setting fires. You aren't any more likely to have a stalker than anyone else these days. This can be your home again because it's where you grew up yet still feel very different from the Trenton you left five years ago."
"I know," she said quietly. "You've been trying to tell me that for a year, but I didn't want to believe it." She laid her head on my shoulder again and relaxed. "I want us to be all together. It's how it should be. I know you would move to Indiana if I asked you to but it isn't fair to you or your business. And it isn't necessary. I can face things here, even if someone decides to be an asshole to me. And I know I have you beside me, and that makes me feel like I can do anything. I know I'm strong enough now to stand up to them, to deal with my feelings about stuff and not try to ignore them. And I know if I asked, you'd throw anyone who needed it out a window."
"Give me a couple of weeks more to recover before you make that particular request," I said. "But I agree with all the other things."
"Do you mind if we wait until after the first of the year?" she asked. "I'd like to spend one more Christmas and New Years in Fort Wayne. We always get together with Katie for those holidays. It'll be hard to leave her," she said, her voice breaking. I held her close and kissed her head.
"Absolutely," I said. "I don't expect you to just walk away from Fort Wayne like it meant nothing to you. It was important for you to be there. Katie's an important person in your life. You need time to say goodbye."
We sat together in the living room the rest of the evening talking about how to tell Stella that she and Stephanie would be living with me in Trenton soon. We knew it would be one more adjustment for her in a year full of changes. She was the most vulnerable of us and we wanted to be as gentle as possible. Stephanie fell asleep spread out next to me on the couch and I decided to leave her there. I turned out the lights and turned off the fireplace. I put a blanket over her and reclined in my own seat. We finally had a plan, and the world felt very right for the first time in years.
A/N: Next chapter is the last one.