Free Rite of Wrongs by Mica Stone

to life than work. “Please, Karen, call me Rome. Or even Miriam. As long as you never call me ma’am .”
    “Oh, I hear you,” Karen responded with a snorting sort of sound. “Of course, I teach my son to use the word to be respectful, then see women younger than me cringe when he does.”
    “It’s a thin line from respect to insult.”
    This time Karen laughed. “It most definitely is.”
    And now that the appropriate chitchat was done . . . “I hope you’re calling with good news?”
    “Interesting news, at least.”
    There was that word again. Interesting. “Oh?”
    “It’s about the tarp. I swabbed some dried blood I found in the seam of the finished edge. Blood that most definitely did not come from the victim.”
    Miriam’s pulse kicked hard.
    “Unfortunately—”
    Crap.
    “It doesn’t belong to your killer, either.”
    “How do you know?”
    “For one thing, it’s been there awhile. It’s not from the crime scene. And then there’s the part where it’s canine.”
    What the hell? “Canine?”
    “Yep. It came from a dog. Woof-woof.”

T WELVE
    Friday, 11:00 p.m.
    Curled up in the corner of her sofa, Miriam reached to the side table for the bowl-shaped margarita glass that held ice, tequila, and a jalapeño mixer. The bottled concoction didn’t turn out drinks half as good as the ones made with fresh peppers. But she was tired, and it was late, and those two components added up to lazy.
    She’d been scheduled to meet her best friend for drinks after work, but Nikki had canceled due to a family emergency. The truth was more drama than disaster. Nikki’s older brother had earned himself a drunk and disorderly when he’d parked outside his ex-wife’s condo and serenaded her at the top of his lungs.
    Just as well. Nikki had been busy. With Miriam’s evening free, she finally had time to dig deeper into Gina Gardner’s diary. She hated that her caseload had gotten in the way of her job. But she was just one woman. And her days, as much as she wished otherwise, gave her only twenty-four hours to work with.
    She’d like to be using some of those hours to sleep. Instead, she pulled the diary from its folder onto her lap. The first page was dated more than eleven years ago. She would’ve been twenty-seven when a forty-four-year-old Gina Gardner had started this record of her life. Thinking about all the things that she’d done during that time . . .
     
    I’m pregnant.
     
    Those were the first words written beneath the date.
     
    I’m forty-four years old, and I’m pregnant. I gotta say, I never saw that coming. Jeff and I have been married for twenty years. We stopped trying to get pregnant, what was it? Ten ago? We made all these plans to travel, and now that money is going to go to the new house.
     
    I’m still trying to decide how I feel about that. Not just motherhood at this stage of the game, but putting off the life we’ve worked so hard for. We were THIS close to having it. How unfair is that? Jeff taking early retirement. Our storing what belongings we didn’t want to get rid of.
     
    Five years visiting every country we could. Taking nothing with us but clothes. Buying what we needed. So many sites to see. So much culture. So much to learn. Cooking classes. Making cheese. Pasta. Wine. We were going to be fat and happy and without a care.
     
    Now I’m going to be the fat one. We’ll be staying put, and Jeff will keep working for years. Who knows if either one of us will be happy.
     
    Dr. Gardner had mentioned their first child being unplanned, but nothing about what he and his wife had given up to start their family. Miriam wondered how long it had taken Gina to come to terms with the upheaval.
    Had she broadcast her uncertainty in such a way that someone had followed her journey as a parent? Judged her based on her early misgivings rather than on the cookies and cupcakes and volunteer hours she’d donated?
    Curious, Miriam paged ahead nine months, then a year, then