Somewhere Out There(10)
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Later that night, after the kids were tucked in and Natalie and Kyle were in their own bedroom, Natalie told her husband about Hailey’s family tree project. “It really made me think about my birth mom,” she said, curling up to her husband, draping one of her legs over his.
At five foot nine, her husband was seven inches taller than she was, built like a wrestler with thick muscular limbs. Name a sport and Kyle had played it, but his personal favorite, the one he still made time for, was racquetball. Any day he wasn’t in court, he’d spend his lunch hour with his friend John at the gym, sweating out the stress from his job. While Natalie supported her husband’s devotion to this activity, the only competition she wanted to participate in was being a contestant on Cupcake Wars; the only workout she enjoyed was speed-rolling hundreds of molasses cookies in crunchy, sparkling sugar for the PTA bake sale at Hailey’s school. Unlike her mother, Natalie was blessed with a metabolism that allowed her to eat whatever she wanted and didn’t require her to exercise in order to maintain her weight—another characteristic she wondered if she had inherited from the woman who’d given her up.
Kyle kissed the top of her head, then ran his fingers up and down her bare arm, giving her goose bumps. There was no place she felt safer than being tucked up against him. “I’ll bet,” he said. “You okay?”
“Sort of,” she said. Kyle knew any discussions of her birth mother dredged up emotions Natalie would rather not feel, and questions she’d probably never have answered. She turned her head to look at him. His eyes were a lighter shade of brown than hers, like copper, flecked with bits of green. Besides his big heart and great sense of humor, they were among the things Natalie loved most about him.
They had met nine years ago, when he was thirty and she was twenty-six. He’d joined her father’s practice about four months after she had, but as they never were assigned to the same case, their interactions were limited to the passing-each-other-in-the-hallway, head-bobbing, hi-how-are-you variety. She knew her father liked Kyle—he’d even gone so far as to say that the younger man was one of the top up-and-coming lawyers in the firm. She’d witnessed more than one female in the office lingering around him, asking insipid questions, and laughing too loudly at his jokes. Like them, she couldn’t help but notice his good looks—in contrast to the well-cut, buttoned-up suits he wore, he had longish, wavy, dark brown hair, full lips, and an easy smile—and while dating among associates wasn’t strictly forbidden as long as it was reported to Human Resources, Natalie preferred to keep her relationships in the workplace on a professional level.
Her and Kyle’s first substantive conversation occurred at the beginning of her second year at the firm, when she was asked to do some research for a first-degree murder case in which he was defending a woman accused of killing her husband.
“Do you have a minute?” she’d asked, standing in the doorway of his dark wood-paneled office, holding a file in her right hand. He sat at his desk, staring at a stack of photos in his hands.
Kyle lifted his eyes to hers when he heard her voice. His face held a haunted, haggard look. “Sorry . . . what?” he said, clearly distracted by whatever it was he’d been looking at.
“I penned an opinion for the case,” she said, taking a few steps toward him. “Do you have time to review it with me? Make sure I didn’t miss anything on what you wanted to say about PTSD-induced psychosis?” Kyle’s argument was self-defense, based on the fact that the husband had been violently abusing his client for ten years and in the moment she’d shot him, she’d been under the influence of ongoing post-traumatic stress disorder.
“Sure,” he said, dropping the pictures onto the blotter. He glanced at them again, then blinked rapidly, as though he were trying to erase the images he’d seen. He gestured toward one of the well-padded, black leather chairs on the opposite side of his large maple desk. “Have a seat.”
Natalie sat down and was about to hand him the papers she held, but instead, concerned by his demeanor, she kept them. “I don’t mean to pry,” she said, feeling her cheeks warm, unsure whether or not she should continue. “But are you all right?”
“I don’t know.” He nodded toward the pictures in front of him. “The police took these when she filed her restraining order against him. Her third restraining order. He broke her collarbone and her arm, that time. And gave her two black eyes. The first time, he fractured a rib that ended up puncturing her lung.”
Natalie stayed silent, watching him drum his fingers on the edge of his desk. She could see what had happened to his client pained him, and it made her think there might be more to this talented litigator than just his handsome face.
“I’d kill him again myself, if I could,” Kyle said. “Fucking bastard.”
Natalie waited a beat before speaking. “I’d help you hide the body,” she said. He smiled, their gazes locked, and the air between them took on an electric, butterflies-in-the-stomach quality. Later, the two would agree that in that moment, it felt as though they were seeing each other for the first time.
That night over drinks and more conversation at a local bar, Natalie learned that despite Kyle’s in-control, polished-lawyer demeanor when he was at work, he was a man who felt things on a deep level. He was just careful about to whom he revealed this part of himself. “My dad was big on not showing your opponents any weakness,” he told her during a discussion of their families. “He drilled it into me and my brother to be tough, so I learned to push down any sign of how I might be feeling in order to come out on top.” He paused and gave her a wry smile. “Unfortunately, that tendency hasn’t worked well for me in my personal relationships.”