Page 73 of No Offense

“Dylan says our first stop on the boat is going to be Tahiti. I’ve never been there, but he says you can just walk up to a tree—any tree—and if it has fruit growing on it, youcan pick the fruit and eat it, and nobody hassles you for stealing their fruit. Not like here in this country.”

Both the Brightons seemed somewhat stunned upon hearing this, so Molly asked, more out of politeness than anything else, “Did that happen to you here, Tabitha? People got angry because you were eating their fruit?”

“Did they ever! We walked by this key lime tree here over by the courthouse, it was bursting all over with fruit—I don’t know if you’ve ever had key limes, but they’re delicious—and Dylan climbed it and started shaking the fruit down to me, and I was catching it in my skirt, and this mean old lady came out of her house and started yelling at us to quit it because we were stealing her fruit.”

“Well,” Molly said slowly, “it was her tree. Maybe she was going to make a key lime pie later.”

“Whatever,” Tabitha said, dismissively. “There was more than enough to share!”

It was a very romantic plan, and Molly wanted to believe in it as much as Tabitha did.

There were just two problems with it. The first was that Molly knew for a fact that Dylan had left Tabitha as well as her baby for dead, which didn’t exactly make him the world’s most desirable partner.

And two, as Tabitha was talking, Molly’s cell phone buzzed. When she glanced at it discreetly, hoping it was John—and also knowing how silly she was being for hoping it was John—she saw that she’d received a text from Dorothy Tifton:

You’ll never believe it! I helped solve a crime! Yes, ME! I caught the High School Thief! I got him to confess and followed him to the gym and called the sheriff!!! They found my iPad and camera in his locker! Your sheriff is interrogating him now! Come to my place tonight to celebrate, 6P.M.! Champagne and caviar!

This was accompanied by an actual photo, apparently taken by Mrs. Tifton, of Dylan Dakota, aka Larry Beckwith III, being led from what looked like the 24 Hour Fitness on Washington Street in handcuffs by a muscular young sheriff’s deputy.

Molly felt the ground shake beneath her. As Little Bridge Island did not sit upon a fault line, it was unlikely there’d been an actual earthquake, so what she’d felt was only in her own mind.

How was she going to break the news to Tabitha that the father of her child had just been arrested? The two of them were going nowhere together, let alone Tahiti, if the sheriff had his way—nowhere except jail.

When she tuned back in to the conversation, she heard Mrs. Brighton saying, “I’m sorry, Tabitha. But raising a child—a newborn—on a boat is unrealistic. Where are you going to get diapers?”

“I’ll be using cloth diapers, of course, Mother, and I’ll wash them in the sea.”

“Oh, for the love of all that is holy.” Mr. Brighton paced the small room, ending up at the window. “Is that adumpI’m looking at, for Christ’s sake? Who in the name of God builds a hospital next to adump?”

“Um, Tabitha,” Molly said, reluctantly clicking on the photo Mrs. Tifton had sent her. She didn’t want to upset the young mother. What if the shock caused her milk to dry up? This happened frequently in novels, at least in the mysteries Molly so enjoyed. But it seemed necessary to tell her. “I just received something I think you should see.”

Tabitha looked unconcerned. “What is it?”

Her look of unconcern turned to deep, deep unhappiness the moment she saw the photo.“What?”she cried. “Whatisthat? When didthathappen? Why? Why would they arrest my Dylan?”

“Well,” Molly said, “for one thing, because of what all of you did to the library. And for another, because he left you instead of getting you help while you were giving birth to Cosette. You could have died. And for another, because he abandoned your baby on a toilet, and then broke into my friend’s house and stole her camera and iPad.”

“He d-didn’t,” Tabitha insisted.

“Tabitha, he did. You know he did. You can lie to the police all you want, but you can’t lie to me.”

Tabitha responded by bursting into loud, hiccupping sobs. This startled everyone in the room, but none more than her mother, who moved quickly to embrace the girl, sitting beside her in the hospital bed and caressing her hair, murmuring, “Oh, sweetheart. Oh, my baby. It’s going to be all right. Everything is going to be okay.”

Except it wasn’t. Of course it wasn’t.

Tabitha’s heart was broken. She’d finally realized the truth—a truth she’d probably known all along, just never allowed herself to think—and now her plans for herself and her baby lay in shatters around her. Molly looked at the weeping girl and couldn’t help feeling very sorry for her. She knew now why John had called her parents. He’d had to. Of course he’d had to.

Because she had no one else. Except for her baby, she was all alone.

“They c-can’t p-prove any of that!” Tabitha cried, desperately grasping at one last straw of hope. “They can’t prove it, can they?”

“Actually,” Molly said, her heart aching for the girl, “they can.”

“What is going on in here?” Dr. Nguyen stood in the doorway with Nurse Cecile and another woman. The other woman was dressed in normal clothes, not nurse’s scrubs or a white physician’s coat, and was holding a clipboard. Molly would have bet her life that she was a social worker. “What have you been saying to my patient to get her so upset?”

“I’m sorry,” Molly said, slipping her cell phone back into her purse. “That was my fault.”

“Are you family?” the social worker asked.