“I’m sorry, what?”

  “Marry that girl, already.”

  “Oh my God. I’m done.” Grace set her fork down and started to shift out of her seat. “I’m not having this conversation.”

  “Three years, Grace!”

  “And three years is three years. We’re not getting married. I had this whole conversation with her mother over Christmas. Amya is on the exact same page as me. It’s not happening. I don’t want to get married. She’s fine with it. End of story.”

  Crystal’s jaw dropped, and her eyes went wide. “But…but I was going to be your maid of honor.”

  “Fuck that. Can you really see me doing that? Honestly? A full out wedding?”

  “No, you’re right,” Crystal muttered. “Get back in your seat, boss. I’ll drop it.”

  “Good. As for the rest of it, nothing happened with Paige and me. It’s done and over with.”

  “Is it really, though? I mean she is still your partner, right?”

  Grace shrugged. “Sometimes. Depends on the case.”

  “Does she still push boundaries?”

  Not answering, Grace took another bite of her food and stared at her plate. She knew the answer, and she knew Crystal knew the answer. She really did not want to talk about it. Amya had begged her to full out put a stop to it, to be blunt to Paige and tell her to stop, but Grace didn’t have the courage. Instead, she did everything in her power to avoid any situation that could end up with Paige and her alone, which was not working to her advantage.

  “Grace.”

  Shaking her head, Grace shoved another forkful of food between her lips. “We’re done talking about this. Tell me about school. I miss the kids.”

  Conceding, Crystal sighed. “School is good. This is a good group of kids this year, unlike last year. They about took all my passion for teaching and stomped it under their feet.”

  “I remember.”

  “These are good kids. Smart kids.”

  “I need to stop by soon. Really, I promise. After spring break?”

  “Sure. We can set up a date for it.”

  “Good.”

  They fell into a brief silence before Crystal broached the next subject she was clearly waiting for Grace to bring up but she hadn’t. “Kit?”

  “What about Kit?”

  “She was there today.”

  “She’s there every day we have the program.”

  “And?”

  “And what?”

  “Come on, Grace, give me something.”

  “What is there to give? She’s still living at home, mostly. She’s with us a lot when she can be. We still pay her phone because her parents are literally doing the bare minimum they have to. I’d rather her hang out at our house than get caught up with the kids she was hanging out with, and I fully expect she’ll spend all of spring break with us once she gets the courage to ask.”

  “I expected nothing less from you.” Crystal smiled and went back to her meal.

  Grace gave in. She flagged Helena down as she walked by. Setting her napkin in her lap, Grace grinned at her and nodded toward Crystal. “My friend here thinks you’re hot, and she would like to go on a date with you, although why she can’t ask you herself is something I can’t fathom. So…now it’s in your court.” She shot Crystal a look at the last bit.

  “Gee, thanks, great smooth move there.”

  “I never claimed to be smooth.”

  Helena scrunched her nose at the two of them before turning to Crystal. “I would love to go on a date with you.”

  “Here’s her number.” Grace pulled out her notepad she always kept in her pocket and wrote Crystal’s number on it, handing it over to Helena. “There, now you owe me.”

  “You’re snarky today.”

  Grace’s lips thinned. “I miss Amya.”

  “We’re back to that?”

  Helena interjected, “Who’s Amya?”

  “My girlfriend,” Grace answered.

  “The most patient fucking person on the planet,” Crystal added. “Seriously.”

  “Interesting.” Helena turned her head for a moment when another table called her over. She excused herself to go back to work and left the two of them alone.

  Grace nodded toward Helena. “You know you’re going to have to explain me in order for her to think you’re really single, right?”

  “Yeah, I always do.”

  “Just making sure.”

  Grace downed her second glass of water as she finished her meal. She was just paying the bill when Crystal started fiddling with her purse and looking around the room nervously.

  “What’s wrong?” Grace asked.

  “Nothing.”

  “You gave her your number. You could always go get hers.”

  “That’s not it.”

  “Then what is it?”

  “I’m thinking about joining up with the band again.”

  Grace shoved her wallet into her pocket but didn’t say anything in response. She honestly wasn’t sure how she felt about it. Crystal had been sober for over two years, unlike Peter, she had been following the program and hadn’t back slid. But the band had been what helped her hide her drinking for so long.

  “Same guys?”

  “Yeah. Their singer got pregnant and isn’t planning on coming back.”

  Taking a deep breath, Grace mulled it over. “I think you should do it, but be careful about it. Singing was good for you, and frankly, you’re good at it.”

  “Thanks.”

  “You don’t need my permission.”

  “I feel like I do.”

  “You’re a dork.” Grace rolled her eyes but felt warm at the fact her opinion mattered so much to Crystal.

  “But you love me.”

  “Of course I do. I have to go and check on Peter.”

  Crystal sighed. “Give him some time, but watch him close, Grace. He’s young still. He wants to hang out with the crowd.”

  “I know. And he’s so sensitive. I think he’s just getting down on himself for falling off the wagon.”

  “I’m glad he found you.”

  Grace chuckled. “More like I found him, drunk in your school, remember?”

  “Trust me. I remember.”

  Grace got out of the booth and headed for the door with Crystal only a few steps behind her. She said her final goodbye with a promise to talk to her in the morning about a date to meet up with her class. Then she headed home, to her empty and Amya-less house.

  The Case

  The office was quiet when she strode in. Most of the desks were empty, but Grace was always early, and typically the first person there. For years she had been a morning person, and without Amya to keep her bed warm, she had been up on and off most of the night.

  She loved when the office was like this. It gave her time to think before the crew headed in for the day and the noise started up. Grabbing a personal-sized bottle of orange juice from the mini fridge after she started the coffee pot, she sat at her desk in the middle of the large room and booted up her computer. It was the perfect way to start a day. Would have been better with Amya, but like she’d told Crystal, she would survive, even if she didn’t like it.

  Sitting at her desk, she downed half the bottle of orange juice before Paige came in for work that morning. Typically Paige, her partner, was always one of the last in, so it was odd she was there so early. Turning in her chair, Grace raised an eyebrow in Paige’s direction, her brown hair mussed, dark rings under her green eyes, and a sorrowful look on her face.

  “What the hell is wrong with you?” Grace asked, her voice pointed and firm in the quiet of the office.

  Paige grunted.

  “No, seriously. What happened?”

  Paige’s gaze slid from her desk to Grace, and she shrugged before she moved to Grace’s desk and sat on the corner of it. With her arms crossed and her long legs still planted on the floor, Grace’s gaze roved over her body up to her face.

  “Break up?”

  “How could you tell?”

  “You’ve only been dating a month.”

  “Not all of us can be in loveless marriages, Grace.”

  “I am not…never mind. What happened?” Grace bit her lip but leaned in her chair to get a fuller view of Paige’s face. The only time to get Paige to talk about this was when they were alone, and they only had ten more minutes before the rest of the crew arrived.

  Paige moved a hand to rub her eyes and then her cheeks. “I have no idea. Something about being unattainable or not emotional. I don’t remember. It was a long night.”

  “You look like you just got off a binge. I thought you were done dating.”

  “I thought I was, too. I definitely am now. I don’t have time for this back and forth. I’ll stick to drinks, sex, and home before dawn. Much better that way.”

  Snorting, Grace shook her head. “For you maybe.”

  Paige narrowed her eyes at Grace. “Like I said, we’re not all in loveless marriages.”

  “First, I am not married.”

  “Oh, we are all aware.”

  “What crawled up your ass? Because this is way out of the ordinary for you.”

  “Sorry.” Paige sighed and rubbed both her hands over her face this time. “Sorry. That was uncalled for, you’re right. Ugh. I’m just going to do some paperwork.” Paige pointed at her desk before she pushed off Grace’s to stand. “Maybe in my morose state today I’ll get it all done and get a sticker from Humbard for completion.”

  “I’m pretty sure if you finished all your paperwork on time or ahead of time, he’d buy you a six pack.”

  Paige’s ears perked up at that. “You think?”

  Grace snorted. “No, asshole. But I’m not sure you’ve ever been caught up on reports.”

  “Well, we can’t all be perfect.” She hit the button on her computer to turn it on with more force than necessary. Paige plopped into her chair after shoving her jacket onto the back of it, the white button up shirt she wore pulling across her chest. Grace’s gaze lingered before she dragged it away.

  Grace debated before speaking again. “Is this going your mood all day? Because if so, I’m not inviting you with me anywhere.”

  The look Paige shot her was the end of the conversation. Grace went back to finishing out her reports from the last week she had avoided then filtered through some of the old cases she had sitting in her desk, the cold cases she loved to work when there were no active case in her possession.

  Within the next hour, the rest of the detectives in her unit filtered in for the day of work. Tuesday morning seemed rough for a lot of them, but she wasn’t going to question why, not after her experience with Paige. She should have left that one alone when she had the chance.

  When Humbard came in, he called Grace over before he even got into his personal office in the back corner of the unit. She pushed up from her chair, chugging the last of her orange juice before she stalked into his office to wait out whatever he had to say.

  “Shut the door,” he said as he put his briefcase and his jacket away.

  Grace raised her eyebrows in curiosity before turning and shutting the door as he had requested. When she’d first started working in Missing Persons, she would have been nervous to sit in the room alone with her captain with the door shut. In her experience, that meant someone was getting in trouble.

  Humbard sighed, adjusting his belt and pants up before he sat in his desk chair and stared right at her. “I’ve got an odd case for you.”

  “Oh?”

  “It’s been through about four other detectives hands, but they’re not making any progress.”

  “Okay?” Grace gnawed on the inside of her cheek. Four detectives meant it was likely an older case, but she couldn’t really imagine a missing persons case that wasn’t a cold case by that point. And cold cases were for a completely different department.

  Humbard brushed a hand through his thinning black hair and opened his desk drawer to pull out the file. “I want your full attention on this case.”

  Grace nodded, waiting impatiently for that file to be in her hands. She had no idea what he was talking about, but the file looked ridiculously thin for four detectives to have worked it. Drawing in a deep breath, she let it out slowly then stared at him.

  “Like I said, this is a weird missing persons case. Kind of a reverse case.”

  “What?” Grace furrowed her brow.

  “Here.” He shoved the file over to her, and as soon as the cool paper hit her fingers, Grace’s stomach twisted.

  She opened to the first page and read the file number and summary. There was no name of the missing, but there was a picture. Sliding it from the paperwork, she stared down at it. He must have been in his late teens. He was clearly in a hospital bed, tubes all over his body, protruding from his mouth and nose and his skin.

  “I don’t understand,” Grace stated.

  “That’s it. No one does. This kid, Joseph is what everyone has been calling him, was found four years ago off Pacific Road just by the hay barn over by the strip mall.”

  “Okay, yeah, I know that place.”

  “Four years ago, some taxi driver found him. Who knows what the driver was doing over in that area, but he found the kid. No one knows who Joseph is.”

  “What?” Grace’s eyes widened, then she stared down at the picture. “So where has he been for the last four years?”

  “In the hospital on life support.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “The nurses and doctors have all fought to keep him on life support. No one knows who he is or where he came from, but they don’t want him to hit five years in there alone. They want to find his family.”

  Shaking her head, Grace turned to stare up at Humbard. The same question she’d been asking the entire time slipped from her lips again. “What?”

  He put his hands in the air with exasperation. “I don’t know. But they pulled strings, got media going, and they are trying to figure out who this kid is.”

  “This is…not a missing persons case, is it? Was there ever a missing persons case for this?”

  “Not one that we can connect to this kid.”

  “So you want me to ID this kid so he can what? Be taken off life support?”

  “No, so his family can make the proper decisions about him.”

  “And you think a family who hasn’t reported a teenager missing for four years deserves to make those decisions about whether or not to continue life support?”

  Humbard’s mouth opened and closed like a fish out of water before he shook his head. “I don’t know. But I was handed the case and told to do something about it. It’s your turn to do something about it.”

  “I…I don’t even know where to begin.” She flipped through a few more of the pages, which had some medical information but not much. She only had the one picture, in which it was hard to even see the kid’s face since it was bruised and cut and so covered in tubes and medical supplies that only one half-decent eye was even poking out. “There’s no more photos.”

  “The case is yours, Halling. I expect you to figure out who the kid is.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “Yes.” Humbard glared at her. “Now get to work.”

  “I…are you sure? Isn’t this a file for cold cases or something?”

  “It’s your case.”

  “What if I don’t want it?”

  “That’s not how this works, Halling. Now get out of my office and start working on it.”

  Still in shock, Grace stumbled before heading to her desk. Sitting in her uncomfortable chair, she blinked at the case file before opening it up. No detective had written a report that was in the file Humbard had handed her. She opened her computer’s file system and searched the case number. Only one additional report popped up. Printing it, she focused on the file in front of her.

  This was insanity. Four years in a hospital, kid clearly an adult at that point, and no one knew who the hell he was. He’d been a minor when he was found, which meant he hadn’t even graduated high school most likely. Running a hand through her hair, she shook her head at the file again. Whatever she had done to piss Humbard off to land this case must have been bad, but she had no idea what it was.

  She snorted. There was nothing else she could do. She was as lost as if she’d been stuck as a detective her first day after the academy. Four fucking years, and this kid still had no name other than the one his doctors and nurses had given him—Joseph. Rolling her eyes, she sent a quick text to Amya telling her she just landed the weirdest case in Missing Persons history.

  With her phone back in her pocket, Grace shoved the case file to the side and went to work on the reports she still had filtering around in her brain. She would finish those before she dove head first into the file Humbard had handed her. It had to be slow if Humbard was doling out four-year-old cases instead of fresh ones.

  ###

  Grace’s cruiser was warm as she went through the fast food drive-thru. Fast food was not her first choice, but she was avoiding. Massively avoiding. The hospital was only a few blocks away, and she had even brought herself a healthy lunch that day with her current favorite, dried mangos, shoved into the bag, but she had stared at the hospital and taken a detour.

  She’d read through the case file three full times and had gleaned nothing other than the detectives who had the case prior had done nothing except let it sit on their desks. The first one had done up a report and an interview on the taxi driver who had found the kid, but that was it.

  Her head reeled. She vaguely remembered the case filtering over the news, but she’d always assumed someone had found the kid’s parents. Grunting, she grabbed her food from the second window and drove to a decently empty parking lot to stuff her face with greasy, unhealthy, and too-good food.

  When she was finished, she had no more excuses. Grace swallowed all the weird emotions raging through her stomach and chest and pulled into the hospital parking lot. She walked slowly, which was not her norm, to the front desk. She’d been in the hospital before—many times actually, but she’d never really been to ICU when she wasn’t the patient, which was exactly once, and she’d never been there to see a kid with no name.