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“March We had those fearm days and Tressa keeps her pool heated”

“Here’s the thing, Jehts “I don’t want you upset with , and I can’t just turn it off because I’”

“I want to hear what you have to say” As she said, she dealt with kids every day He’d value her input

“You re? And you were adamant that if there’d been any, you’d have noticed?”

His blood ran cold

“After I interviewed you—and Levi—I knew you were right There was no way you’d have missed the bruises, and I believed you hadn’t seen theation There was no evidence to substantiate the claim, so I had to believe someone had simply been overzealous”

He wondered if she should be telling him all of this

“But now The tiht, Jem I think that Levi’s torso was covered in bruises And that they’d faded before you saw him”

Tressa wouldn’t hold Levi so tight, for so long, that his torso would be covered in bruises She’d No, she just wouldn’t She was his mother

A drama queen, yes Unpredictable and self-absorbed a lot of the time But not when it came to Levi She always put him first

His almost-full-time custody of their son was a case in point Tressa was ht phone conversations were testimony to that fact

She planned everything else around her weekends with hi out when it was her turn to care for their son—unless she absolutely couldn’t help it She was agreeable anytime Jem asked her to keep Levi for an hour or two if he had a business dinner or associationto attend

“Say so”

He didn’t knohat to say “I’ll talk to her”

“You think she’ll be honest with you? If she was going to ad him, don’t you think she’d already have told you?”