Chapter 18 - Hold On
Leah jumped in.
The cold stole her breath.
Her body screamed in pain, but she forced herself toward the place Nathan had vanished.
Her hand found his shirt beneath the surface.
She pulled.
He came up coughing.
“Grab the rail!”
“I can’t—”
“Yes, you can!”
Nathan caught the lower rung of a maintenance ladder.
Leah clung beside him.
Above them, Doreen shouted, “Nathan, let her go!”
He looked up at his mother.
Then at Leah.
His face changed.
“No.”
One word.
Late, insufficient, but finally his own.
Ruiz and two officers burst into the pump station.
“Drop the weapon!”
Doreen spun.
Rusk tried to run and slipped on the wet concrete.
The gun clattered away.
Ruiz tackled Doreen before she reached it.
Nathan and Leah were pulled from the water.
Leah’s first words were, “Noah.”
Simone met her outside the ambulance bay carrying him.
Leah collapsed around her son.
Noah opened his eyes.
Tiny. Dark. Alive.
Mae was rushed to surgery. Nathan needed six stitches and treatment for hypothermia. Rusk was arrested before midnight.
Doreen sat handcuffed in the back of a cruiser, wrapped in a hospital blanket.
As officers prepared to close the door, she looked at Leah.
“You think this ends with me?”
Leah stopped.
Doreen leaned closer to the window.
“Ask Harold’s lawyer why the trust was rewritten three days before he died.”
The cruiser door slammed.
Nathan stared after it.
Leah turned to him.
“What does that mean?”
He shook his head.
May you like
“I don’t know.”
But the fear on his face said he had an idea.
