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breath and returned her
steady stare. If she was going to judge Mike because his father
carried a gun, he’d skip this school. He’d make other plans. He’d
beg Harriet Simka to take Mike on, and he’d beg Mike to accept
Harriet. Because, damn it—
    “ In order for us to work
successfully with a child, we need to know what’s going on in that
child’s life. It’s not like I want to know your personal business,
Mr. Russo. But as it is, we’d be pushing our enrollment limits to
let Michael in. I’d really like to help you out—and to help him,
too. I think he’d be very happy here. But...your gun makes me
nervous.”
    She had guts, he’d give her that. She knew
her mind, and she knew her school. “I know gun safety.”
    “ Gun safety doesn’t
include bringing a pistol into a preschool, Mr. Russo. Guns are
weapons. They’re deadly.”
    “ I know exactly how deadly
guns are.”
    “ Do you?”
    “ I’m a cop.”
    Her brow creased in a frown. “If you’re a—a
police officer, you ought to know better than to bring a gun into a
day care facility.”
    “ I was on my lunch break
yesterday,” he told her. “I had an hour to visit day care
facilities. I kept the gun holstered and hidden. It’s not like I
went into your classrooms and did show-and-tell with
it.”
    “ Thank heavens for that,”
she muttered, a hint of her smile returning.
    “ Mike doesn’t touch my
gun. I’m not even sure he’s ever seen it. It’s kept unloaded and
locked up when I’m home.”
    She held his gaze for a moment, then glanced
past him. He turned but saw nothing in particular going on where
she was looking. When he turned back, she was studying her hands.
They were small, not much bigger than a child’s.
    “ I’ve seen what guns can
do,” he remarked. “I know just how dangerous they are.”
    “ I’m sure.” She seemed
fascinated by her clear, shiny nail polish.
    “ You don’t like cops,” he
guessed.
    She glanced up again. Her eyes seemed to
take up half her face, and the thick dark lashes fringing them made
them look even larger. “I never said that, Mr. Russo. And I’m sorry
if you think I’m a busybody. But this is my school, and I’m
concerned about children’s safety. And violence. And weapons.”
    “ We have the same
concerns,” he told her. He didn’t like civilians passing judgment
as if they knew more about violence and weapons than cops did. When
it came to children, she was the expert. But safety? That was his
profession, not hers.
    Her gaze skittered past him again, and when
she returned it to him her expression was pleasantly neutral. “I
suppose one concern we share is your son. To get his enrollment in
place, I’ll need to have the forms I gave you yesterday, plus a
tuition payment.”
    “ I left all that in the
car.” He twisted to view his son hurling himself around in the foam
pit, then eyed her again. “So, he’s in?”
    “ Yes.” She smiled
reluctantly. “He’s in.”
    John didn’t return her smile. He knew how
Mike was in: with an asterisk next to his name. With a question
mark. With a note from teacher Shannon Hull mentioning his
aggressive tendencies. With a red flag on his file, because his
father was a cop and carried a gun, so he couldn’t possibly be a
good father.
    But John already knew that being a cop
knocked him off the Ideal Family Man list. That was why Sherry had
left—because John was too busy being a cop, saving the world, to
notice that the most important part of his own world was falling
apart. Because cops worked late and thought too much about the
abundance of evil in the world, and because it was easier to lock
up a service revolver than to lock up a career’s worth of doubt and
despair at the end of the day. Because sometimes you spent your
shift mopping up after a murder-suicide, and by the time you were
done with that, you didn’t have the energy to fight with your kid
over a bath.
    The Children’s Garden Preschool was free to
blame John for all