OLIVIA

"Blake, can I borrow your laptop?"

"Yeah, just give me a second."

Blake started pushing off pencils and pens and papers off his desk in his mission to unbury his laptop from the bottom of the pile. Olivia bent down and picked up things that rolled and floated the floor. Eventually, Blake managed to extricate said laptop without dropping anything else.

Olivia handed him a fistful of sketching pencils and took the laptop in exchange. "Thanks," she said.

"We really need to get you a laptop too. It's probably such a chore for you to always keep coming in here and asking. And what if we both need it at the same time, right?" Blake began rearranging his papers into a bigger mess. "Anyways, we don't have to think about that right now. Let me know if you need help with the printing or something."

Olivia didn't know how much a laptop cost, but she knew they were expensive. She didn't want to be a bigger problem to Elijah, but Blake also had trouble giving her his laptop for everything. Sooner or later, something had to give.

Pushing the thought from her mind, she sat down at Logan's desk and put the laptop in front of her. She took out her history notebook that she never used, flipped to the back of it, and rewrote the names of the police officers on both sides of the paper on a fresh paper.

Then she got to work searching up every police officer there was on the list, looking for faces to put to a name.

For the next hour, she looked through online newspapers and Google images and old Facebook profiles and posts for a glimpse into who the faceless names she had carried around for four months now were. Olivia expected to see that half of them - precisely the half that resided on one side of the page - would be angry, snarling people, but they weren't. They all looked to be clean, polite officers upholding the law.

To say the least, Olivia was getting extremely discouraged until she pulled up Allen's picture, Shane Allen to be exact.

It was the same man who met Detective Julian for coffee that same day.

Olivia wrote in the name Herrera next to Allen and put a question mark next to it. She knew it could be a coincidence that they were meeting. They could just be friends, with neither of them knowing if the other was crooked or not. Detective Julian could be uninvolved in all of this, just meeting up with another officer during his break time.

But she circled his name and put a star next to it anyways. 

After writing in court cases that the police officers had testified in, people that they had put away, and their precinct numbers, she had at least a four line profile on each of the ten people her mom had so carefully written out.

And she had gotten absolutely nowhere. 

She still had no idea if anyone was bad, if anyone was good, didn't even know if they were dead or alive.

Frustrated, Olivia put her hands on the keyboard, and a thought suddenly hit her. Ever since Blake had told her a bit about their father, she had been curious as to who the man actually was. What better way to find out than Google? She hesitated, then typed in the name Mario Russo.

An image of a smiling police officer in a blue uniform popped up.

Olivia put her head down against the desk and groaned aloud. It took all of her self-preservation not to bang her forehead against the wood until she passed out.

Even her goddamn father was a police officer.

Why? Was she cursed? Was there some omen hanging over her head that attracted blue uniforms to her life and then made them do evil things?

Olivia glumly put her chin in her hands and stared at the screen, where her father's smile was blinding. Logan had inherited his curly black hair and dark eyes, and Olivia herself had his nose and his mouth. He didn't look like someone who had a drinking problem, like Blake had said. He didn't look like someone who had been thrown out of his own house, someone who tried to force his way back in every now and then.

Maybe he was better now. Maybe the drinking had stopped, and Elijah just didn't know. Maybe he wanted to apologize, and her brothers just weren't letting him.

Maybe she needed to meet him, her dad, the parent she had left.

Olivia realized what she was thinking and tried not to slap herself. What if her dad was a crooked cop too? What if he was also trying to kill her? What if he was the one that had orchestrated this whole mess in the first place? After all, her mother would have known him, might have had some contact with him that put her in this mess in the first place.

She turned her page of information on the list of cops she had, skipped a few empty pages, and wrote her dad's name at the top. Then she began clicking through websites and filling in information on him. She put in his district (42), his title (Detective), and a few famous court cases he had appeared and testified in. There were a handful of robbery cases, two murders, and aggravated assault by a juvenile, all cases where he had managed to put the criminal away behind bars. It seemed like the man had never failed to excel at his job.

His day job, that is. He had failed as a parent, if Blake's story was even slightly accurate, and that job should have been important over all others.

She sighed and began clicking through the tabs she had been going through. Page after page of blue uniforms went by until she began to feel sick. Oliva clasped her hands behind her neck and took in deep breaths to calm the nauseous feeling, but she wasn't feeling panicked like she had when she got to the office to find Detective Julian there.

She was getting a little angry.

It was just her luck that she was surrounded by police officers, people who you ran to for help. Everyone knew that in an emergency you called the police, but Olivia knew that if she ever called them, it would have to be for someone else, and she would be gone by the time the paramedics and law enforcement got there.

She was sick and tired of hiding.

She wanted to hug her brothers and not have to wonder if she was making a big mistake. She wanted to be truthful to Blake when he asked her what was wrong. She wanted to take up Elijah's offer that he would be there no matter what. She didn't want to hold them at arm's length. She wanted to love them, and she wanted to love them hard.

The longer she sat there, the more she started to hate the mess her mom dragged her into. Why had she gone to these lengths? How had she gotten into this mess in the first place? Her mother wasn't a nosy person. She liked to keep to herself. She liked to be home with Olivia if she wasn't at work and spend her time in the kitchen baking sweet things.

Olivia closed her eyes, trying to bring to memory her mother's cheerful face as she stood in their tiny, almost bare kitchen. In all of her memories, her mother's graying hair was done up in a french braid, her eyes crinkling with laughter at something Olivia or she herself had said. She wasn't an angry person, she wasn't closed off. She was always warm; her voice, her hands, her hugs had always been open for her.

Something clutched Olivia deep in her chest. It gripped her lungs and seemed to squeeze the air from them and squeeze tears right out of her eyes. Olivia pressed her palms against her pouring eyes and tried to breathe past the burning in her throat.

She would never hear her laugh again. She would never feel her hand on her shoulder again. She would never put her head down in her mother's lap and cry about her problems ever again.

Tears dripped onto her notebook and smeared the words she had so carefully written. They dripped onto the keys of Blake's laptop and onto Logan's desk. Olivia wiped her nose with her sleeve and tried to calm her pounding heart, the heart that was trying to beat right out of her chest and fall splat onto the floor so it could finally rest, finally be still. It wouldn't hurt anymore, it wouldn't mourn.

Olivia drew her knees up to her chest and tried to keep her heart in its ribcage, where it was supposed to be, but her eyes wouldn't stop watering. She pressed her forehead against her knees and breathed out through her mouth, trying to at least steady her gasping breaths.

A gentle knock came on her open door. "Livy? Are you okay?"

Olivia didn't want to pick her head up. Blake was going to see her tear stained, blotchy face, but she had to lift her head and close the tab on Mario Russo that was still open on his laptop screen. She knew Blake wouldn't get mad - he wasn't like that - but it didn't seem like a very nice topic for him. He had struggled a lot trying to tell her about him yesterday, and it hadn't even been much. She didn't want him to think about it if he didn't want to.

She wiped her face was best she could against her already soaked sleeve and clicked out of all the tabs on Blake's computer. "I'm fine," she murmured. She inhaled as best as she could and held her breath so he wouldn't hear her hiccuping.

Blake didn't seem to hear her. He came all the way into the room and reached out to take her hand. "Why are you crying? Is everything okay?"

"It's nothing," she managed in a watery voice. She didn't want to keep putting her grief on them. She didn't know everything about Dad and their lives before she came, but she knew they had enough of their own problems to deal with. They didn't need hers too.

"I do hope it's a little more than nothing. Come here," he said, settling himself on the armrest of her chair. He put an arm around her head and hugged her to his ribs, like he had when she had her panic attack in the principal's office.

The memory only made her cry harder. She still had no idea what she was doing, she still didn't know if Detective Julian was a dirty cop, and she still couldn't stop hyperventilating over the thought of facing the police again. She wasn't getting anywhere. Her mom would be disappointed.

"It's okay," Blake said, his quiet voice drawing her out of her thoughts. "Just let it out. You don't have to keep it in and pretend everything's fine."

"I'm sorry," she managed through trembling lips. "I can't -"

"Hey, hey," Blake coaxed. "You don't have to apologize. You don't have to say anything. Just breathe."

But she couldn't breathe. Her nose was clogged and her throat felt stuffed full of cotton and she couldn't stop imagining her mother dead in the ground, cold and lonely.

"You're not alone, Olivia," her brother said gently. "Me and Elijah and Logan - we're all here for you. We want to be here for you."

Olivia pressed her forehead against his side and took in a shaky breath. "It's just-" A sob came up her throat and she swallowed it down, then couldn't get the rest of her sentence out. She wanted her mom to put her hand in her hair, she wanted to put her head against her mom's side. She knew Blake and her other brothers were there for her, but she needed her mom.

Blake sat with her in silence and gently stroked her sweaty, tear drenched hair away from her face for what seemed like hours. He didn't make her say anything and he didn't ask her any questions. He only reached forward from time to time and handed her tissues from the tissue box on Logan's desk.

Eventually, her brother's warm presence managed to calm down her sobs and the last of her hiccups died away.

"You okay now, Liv?" Blake asked when she lifted her head.

Olivia nodded, her eyes fixed on the giant drenched spot on the side of his shirt. "I'm sorry," she mumbled.

Blake shook his head. "Really, Liv, I like this shirt but I'm not too attached to it. It can go in the wash." He laughed quietly and kissed her cheek. "I'm just glad to be here with you."

That one casual comment made her lip start to wobble again, but she pressed down the burning in her throat. Feeling that he had the right to know why she had a breakdown for no reason, she sniffled, "I just miss my mom sometimes."

His face turned somber, the laughter gone from his eyes. "I can't imagine," he said. "Losing someone so suddenly."

It had been sudden. One moment she was there, and the next, she was gone.

"I didn't know she was going to leave me," Olivia rasped, remembering how sure she had been she would meet up with her mother at the store, that as soon as she got there her mother would make everything alright and they would be able to go home. "She didn't tell me."

"Yeah," Blake murmured. "It's the suddenness that really gets to you. Before, you feel like there were no warning signs, no hints, but afterwards you wonder why you couldn't have seen."

There had been a warning sign - a giant, glaring neon sign - the night she had died, but Olivia hadn't noticed it until it was too late. Blake was right. She would spend the rest of her life trying to understand why she hadn't understood, wondering if it would have made a difference.

"Do you think - that she's angry at me?"

"Why would she be angry with you?"

"I could have known. It was like she tried to tell me, but I was too confused to know. Maybe she would -"

"Olivia, you couldn't have known," Blake broke in, interrupting all her maybes. "When people leave us....."

She heard him swallow uncomfortably and when he spoke, his voice was hoarse. "When people leave us, it's easy to look back and wonder why we didn't see. But in the moment, maybe they just didn't know how to let you know in a way you understood. Or maybe it wasn't easy for them to help you understand. Or maybe they didn't want you to know."

"Why didn't she let me know?" Olivia demanded. A tear ran down her cheek and Blake gently brushed it away. "Why didn't she want me to know?"

Blake looked away and stared morosely at the floor. "Maybe she just loved you too much, Liv. Maybe she couldn't bring herself to say it because she thought it would hurt you."

"How is that love? How is it, when it means she can't love me anymore?"

"She loves you, Liv," Blake persisted. "She loved you in her own way when she made her decision and she still loves you. She wouldn't want you to keep thinking that you did something wrong. Whatever she did, she did for a reason, whether you'll ever know it or not, but that reason wasn't to make you suffer forever."

"Sometimes, it feels like it," she said bitterly.

Blake sighed. "I know, Liv," he said quietly. "I know."

Olivia put her arms around her brother's waist and rested her cheek again against his ribs and as he gently rubbed circles into her back, she thought of her mom and wondered why Blake had known somewhat of what it felt like. 

Hi guys! I made my own birthday cake this week and it turned out SO much better than my last disaster and it was the most beautiful bright blue frosted thing ever. I will eat ANYTHING with blue frosting. 

And then totally unexpectedly I got a notification that Lauranne562 nominated The Rules They Broke for the fiction awards best plot and it was so out of the blue I cried happy tears.

That being said...I've never done this before but if you guys do enjoy this book, I would love it if you went to the 2020 book of thefictionawards and commented the title of this book and my username under best plot. And don't forget to nominate other good books too! 

Edited this part to include the list of police officers that I forgot to include the first time around.

Remember to vote and comment <3

For next time: we can't always have Blake's hugs and be warm and feel safe...