Harmonized Read Online Free Page A

hardest thing I’ve ever done. If I could do it over—”
    â€œOkay, Ms. De La Cruz, you’ve got our attention,” Reynolds said, cutting her off and pushing into the room with O’Dell on his heels.
    â€œGet that on your way out,” O’Dell said to Zig and pointed at the door.
    Zig closed the door quietly and headed back to his computer. Her words playing over and over in his mind. What did she mean by coming in here and dropping the bomb that leaving him was the hardest thing she’d ever done? Did the damn woman do anything subtly?
    He wanted to be pissed at her. Hating her made her leaving him bearable, made it possible for him to go on with his life. Okay so he was a bit commitment-shy, but what man in his twenties wasn’t? And fuck it! Her words plucked at his dumb-as-sea-glass heart.
    And like sea glass, if he let her matter to him again, when she walked away this time, his heart would shatter.
    ***
    â€œYou saw the baby’s aura? Not in person. Not since the delivery. But you saw it in a
picture
?” asked the cop with the bushy mustache. If disbelief walked around incarnate, it would inhabit the two cops who’d been grilling Karma for the past forty minutes.
    Her plan had been to show them the diary she’d found in Gwyn’s place but Zig’s ominous warning about breaking and entering played through her mind as she stared at their collective aura. It pulsed an ugly crimson, tinged with a putrid shade of dark green—vanity, resentment, and disbelief pooled around them like awful mood lighting.
    Since their auras showed contempt for her, Karma kept the diary in her purse and focused on the auras instead.
    â€œYes. I saw Wesley’s aura the day he was born. And I see it now, in that picture.” She tapped the photo with her finger. “It’s what alerted me to the fact that the world is going on the assumption that he went off that bridge with Gwyn. He couldn’t have. His aura wouldn’t still be in the picture if he were dead. So, you need to open the case again. Wesley is alive, his aura is blue-silver, and it’s fading.”
    â€œWe have three witnesses who saw your friend jump with her infant in her arms. One of those witnesses tried to stop her and got scratched up in the process. Gwyn Bremer was fished out of the Chesapeake when she and her baby were swept out into historically rough current. But you
see
an aura in this picture, so naturally we should assume the baby is what, part fish, and still paddling around the bay?” The shorter one frowned at her then gave his partner the
this-woman’s-effing-nuts-look
.
    â€œNo. I’m not saying he’s in the bay. If I knew where he was, I’d get him myself. Just look at his picture, it’s in his eyes.”
    Karma tapped the photo again. Sometimes, even mundanes could see a flash of auras in photos. She prayed one or both of these men would really look. Reynolds—or was it O’Dell?—picked up the picture. They hadn’t bothered with introductions, so she wasn’t sure which one was which. Instead, they’d hammered her with questions, in tandem, hardly giving her ample time to answer.
    â€œThere’s life in his eyes,” she said the moment a look of surprise briefly lit the mustache cop’s face. Now was the time to show them the diary. Reaching for her purse she added, “It was brighter earlier. A warm ocean blue–green. Kind of peaceful.”
    â€œAre we talking about the kid’s eye color?” Mustache cop gave her a frown so deep it created a vertical crease between his equally bushy eyebrows. Suspicion darkened his expression as he watched her lift her purse from the floor and set it on her lap.
    â€œNo, not his eye color.” She shifted in the seriously uncomfortable chair, clutching the diary through her handbag. “There’s a vibrancy in his eyes. Most people see it. I just see it with