Undeniably Yours by Heather Webber

as he needed his beauty sleep. He was curled with Thoreau at the foot of the bed; their two bodies so close that it was hard to see where one ended and the other began. Odysseus was running a marathon on his wheel, his piece of cantaloupe stored away in his plastic igloo for a midnight snack.
    I queued up news footage, taken shortly after the original story broke (thank goodness for YouTube). Cameras had followed police as they took Alisha in for questioning. She, of course, had denied any culpability, laying the blame squarely on the CFC. She claimed they’d taken custody of Dustin months before, in January, yet she’d told no one about it. For months . I had to admit, she seemed guilty as hell.
    I clicked on another video, this one of Dustin’s caseworker as she left the district attorney’s office after being questioned. Catherine “Cat” Bennett was twenty-five years old and looked fifteen. Young and pretty with light brown hair and big brown eyes. She’d been crying as she raced to her car, her husband at her side attempting to shield her from cameras with his suit coat. When he dropped his car keys and bent to pick them up, photographers swarmed as they tried to capture Cat’s tear-stained face. The encounter had her hysterically sobbing by the time the pair had driven off.
    Cat Bennett claimed the last time she had seen Dustin was December, and he’d been alive and well. She fully accepted her role in the case—that she had let Dustin fall through the cracks by missing months and months of check-ins.
    The next video was of similar footage, except this time of Elliman Bay, Cat Bennett’s supervisor, as he exited the police station with his lawyer. He wore a baby-blue button-down shirt that complemented his dark skin. His lawyer kept repeating “No comment” to the reporters as he headed for a dark SUV.
    My phone rang, and I leaned so far off the bed to grab it from the nightstand that I nearly fell off. Laughing, Sean grabbed my arm, pulling me back up.
    “Dovie,” I said to him.
    “Good luck.” He went back to his book, a nonfiction account of hikers lost in the wilderness. Not my idea of light bedtime reading.
    “You need to come down here,” Dovie said, her voice going up an octave. “I need reinforcements.”
    I let out a breath of relief that she hadn’t learned about Kira’s investigation. “What’d Preston do?”
    “It’s what she won’t do. She doesn’t want to watch TV, doesn’t want to play Scrabble, doesn’t want to do a puzzle. She keeps sneaking out of bed to try and find her phone. I finally had to bury it in the sand.”
    “X marks the spot?”
    “Not funny, LucyD.”
    “It’s only a couple of weeks,” I said.
    “I need help.”
    “Cutter’s there.” I still needed to call him.
    “He’s the only reason she’s eating.”
    Preston was as stubborn as they came.
    “You’ll come?” Dovie pressed.
    “I can’t.”
    “Why?”
    “I can’t leave Sean. He needs me.”
    He raised an eyebrow. I shrugged. Any port in a storm.
    “Bring him. There’s plenty of room.”
    Ebbie swatted the phone. “The pets…”
    “Bring them,” Dovie repeated.
    “I have some readings scheduled…”
    “Reschedule them.”
    “Dovie, you’ll be fine without me. You might want to rent a bunch of musicals—Preston loves those. Then go to the bookstore. She loves to read. Anything and everything. Buy her lots of trashy magazines. And ice cream. Gallons of ice cream.”
    Dovie sniffed. “Fine, but if none of those work, then you’re getting your ass down here even if I have to drag you myself.”
    “I love you, too.” At the click in my ear, I hung up, and glanced at Sean. “She might disown me when all this is said and done, and she learns the truth.”
    “That’s a lot of disowning in one day.”
    I’d already told him about my father. “I’m lucky that way, I guess.”
    “You still have your mother.”
    “Until she wants to get matching tattoos.”
    He laughed and