“Ah,” she said. “I’ll leave early, too, and head home, so you can get on the road.” She seemed to drift off in thought for a moment, then she asked, “Do you ever bring her gifts? Can you give her gifts?”
“Only a few things are allowed. She usually just likes company. She likes seeing me, so I go. Why do you ask?”
She screwed up the corner of her lips as if she were deep in thought. “You said she had a dream to make doggie coats. Right?”
“Yeah. She actually gave me a pattern to hold onto,” he said with a light laugh. It was absurd. But it was also very much like his mom. “It has a dog bone design on the back.”
“Do you have it?”
“I do,” he said, turning to look her in the eyes. “Why?”
“I have an idea. Would you like me to make it for her? As a gift. You could bring it to her. I mean, obviously she doesn’t have a dog in prison. But she might enjoy seeing the jacket. It might make her happy, right? Just to see it. If that was her dream to make them.”
His heart stuttered. It stopped beating for a moment, then it thumped harder against his chest, as if it were trying to fight its way out to get closer to her.
“You’d do that?” he asked, dumbfounded.
“Sure. I can sew. I’m sure I’m not great at it like she was. I couldn’t make a living from it. But I know what I’m doing. I still have a Singer machine. I could do it an hour. It’s not hard to make a doggie coat if there’s a pattern.”
“And you’d do that for my mom? Who’s in prison? For murder?” he asked, and he was sure shock was etched on his features.
She shifted in the water that was now cooling. Some sloshed over the side of the tub. “I don’t judge her. It’s not my place,” she said softly, her blue eyes so honest, so guileless. “She’s your mother, and the only thing that really matters to me is that without her I wouldn’t have you in my life. And I want you in my life.”
And then his heart managed to break free. It jumped from the steel cage he’d once kept it in and raced to the woman in his wet arms. He belonged to Sophie. He cupped her beautiful face in his hands and memorized this moment. The cooling water. The dark of the night. The still in her home. The racing of his heart.
She’d bewitched him, and he didn’t ever want to be without the only person, besides his family, who he’d ever loved. “I’m in love with you, Sophie. I’m so in love with you.”
She beamed. A smile broke across her face. “Oh, Ryan. I am so madly in love with you. I never stood a chance of not falling in love with you.”
He smothered her in kisses in the tub. Then he lifted her out, dried them both off, and led her to the bed. Holding her close, he planted kisses all along her sweet skin, from belly to breast, elbow to ear. “I’m so in love with you,” he said, over and over. It was like a dam breaking inside him, and he couldn’t hold back anymore. He’d spent so long keeping all his secrets clutched tight and locked up, and this one truth, this incomparable, all-encompassing fact of his existence, insisted on being heard tonight.
He couldn’t stop telling her as he held her tight. “I’m so in love with you I don’t even know what to do.”
“Just love me,” she whispered back, and a tear rolled down her cheek.
“I do. I will,” he said, and he kissed the tear away. “Please love me, too.”
“I do, Ryan. I do love you so much.”
Then, he made love to her as midnight fell across the city of sin. As he moved over her, they were the only two people in the whole wide world.
She’d become his world.
Chapter Thirty-Two
Something wasn’t right.
She’d noticed it when she traced the pattern on paper, and now she was seeing it for sure on the muslin fabric.
Sophie studied the cloth in front of her, trying to figure out where she’d gone wrong. The little doggie neck-to-tail measurement simply didn’t line up. Was it a shorter jacket, perhaps? Mid-back? But as she peered at the printout of the pattern again, she reconfirmed that the coat was supposed to cover up the belly and back, as a coat should do.
Bright morning sun streamed through her living room window. It was an early morning for a notorious late sleeper, but her day was packed, especially since she needed to squeeze in this sewing project before she began her final preps for the benefit tonight. Ryan had departed at the crack of dawn to take care of his dog, and she’d dusted off her sewing machine, setting up on the table by the window, ready to tackle this gift.
He’d emailed her a photo he’d taken of the printed pattern, and she’d grabbed some fabric she had on hand from a few years ago when she’d made a mod retro skirt.
Grabbing a new section of fabric, she followed the measurement once again.
Whoa. That definitely was wrong. Wrong size. Wrong shape. Wrong everything.
Had it been that long since she had sewn? No, it was only two years ago when she’d made that skirt. This pattern didn’t seem so complex as to throw her off like this, even with a dog bone design on the back.
Staring at the pattern again as if it would reveal its secrets, she spotted something odd in the first row of instructions, then her brain turned it around. A light switch flicked on.
“Ah!” she said, tasting victory.
She’d just reverse a few of these steps to make the pattern work. Easy enough. Grabbing her pencil, she jotted down the correct order of the steps.
She blinked.
She peered more closely at the numbers in the first row. They lined up precisely with the reverse letters of the alphabet.
She counted off in her head, quickly transposing the numbers into letters, her analytical mind easily sliding into coding mode.
James Street.
A hotbed of crime once upon a time.
Studying the numbers more closely, they clicked into place, sliding like puzzle pieces.
This pattern wasn’t a dog jacket.
The measurement was wrong because the first row spelled out a street name, then what appeared to be two addresses on James Street. Her mind raced back to a few weeks ago when John had let slip a small detail from the case.
‘Today was like a goddamn puzzle. You know the math problems you can’t solve? And this was over addresses. Fucking addresses from years ago.”
Oh God.
She dropped the paper as if it were on fire. She scrabbled back in her chair, standing up, then backed away from it as if it would curse her.
Could it be? Did that pattern hold the clues to what her brother was looking for in the case? Was this dog jacket pattern from Ryan’s mother something else? Something more? Something that revealed…
Breathe in.
Breathe out.
She inhaled sharply, remembering what her brother had told her the very first day, before either of them realized her Ryan was his Ryan.
“Something that would help me find the other guys I think were involved.”
John was looking for accomplices. He’d thought Ryan was hiding something. But if this pattern unfolded into code, as she reasoned it would, then Ryan wasn’t hiding anything at all. He couldn’t possibly know there were addresses buried inside his mother’s “prize” dog jacket pattern.
Only a seamstress would know this pattern wasn’t a pattern. Only a man or woman who attempted to make this jacket would be able to tell it wasn’t for a dog.
Pacing in circles in her living room, she tried to settle her galloping heart. She worked to calm her overactive brain. She didn’t want to jump to conclusions. She needed to check, and double check. That was what she’d done in school. That was always her strategy. Make certain. Make sure.
She headed to her desk, flipped open her laptop, and started plugging in the two addresses on Google Maps. They showed up near each other in the same neighborhood—a dangerous section of town years ago that had since been gentrified. Sophie wanted to know who lived there. Property records weren’t hard to find—everything was online these days in realtor databases. She plugged the addresses into a realtor search. But the records revealed only when the homes were last sold—a few years ago. Nothing showed the owners’ names now, or from when this pattern was made, nearly two decades ago.