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The second Shelby is out of my room, the rage inside of me, simmering just below the surface, rips from my chest. With a single swipe of my arm, I shove everything off my work desk, sending it crashing to the floor and against the wall. The thud echoes throughout the room, sounding like a rocket exploding in the night’s sky.

“Fuck!” I roar, raking my hand over my face. All these years, she hid my daughter from me, and the only reason her existence was made known to me now is because Shelby needs my help to find her, leaving me only to wonder: what would’ve happened if she hadn’t disappeared? Would she have ever told me?

Now, because of her mother’s decision, I may never get the chance to meet her. The one person on this earth with a piece of me inside of her, stolen away before I could even set my eyes on her.

The minutes tick by slowly until Shelby walks back into my room, clutching a hot pink MacBook against her chest like a shield of armor. Her eyes fall to the mess behind me and soften.

“I, uh… here,” she stammers, handing it to me. When my fingers graze hers, she recoils from my touch, and fuck if it doesn’t hurt, even as pissed as I am. I loved this woman with every fiber of my being. I wanted to make her mine, to give her my last name. Now, as she stands there, she shivers at the idea of breathing the same air as me.

Focus on the girl. Thinking about the past isn’t going to fix the present.

“I don’t know the password.”

“A password has never stopped me before, and it isn’t going to now.” I retrieve both items from Shelby and set them on my now cleared desk before I turn back to her. “First, we’re going to call and get this Amber Alert bullshit taken care of right now.”

“You really think you can get them to issue it?”

“You said they needed to talk to her father, which according to you, is me. If that’s all that’s holding up the process, it should work.”

Shelby doesn’t move.

“You gonna call them, or are you going to give me this detective’s number?” Shelby pulls out her ancient cell phone and presses her finger to the screen. Snatching it from her as the first ring goes through, I put it on speakerphone. “What’s this asshole’s name?”

“Detective Fischer. Please, don’t piss him off. He was less than helpful earlier. I’m worried that if you go all you on him, he’ll refuse to help at all,” she pleads.

“It’s his fucking job to help, Shelby. If he’d done his job, there would’ve been an Amber Alert out hours ago.” And then she wouldn’t have come to me and turned my life upside down, but I leave that part out.

A voice answers on the second ring. “Beckettville Police Department.”

“Yeah, I need to speak to Detective Fischer regarding my missing daughter.”

“He’s not here right now, sir.”

“Then who the fuck’s there?” I growl. It’s no secret that I hate fucking cops, but this one time, they could prove useful. As I don’t have that kind of reach, an Amber Alert will have every single person in the state on the lookout for my girl.

“Please hold. I’ll transfer you to one of the detectives on duty.”

A few beeps go by before someone else answers. “Detective Moulton.”

“Yeah, my kid’s missing, and I want to know why the fuck your department is refusing to put an Amber Alert out on her.”

“Sir, calm down. Amber Alerts have certain criteria that have to be met before we can issue one. We can’t just put one out on any kid who’s wandered away from home.”

“She hasn’t run away,” Shelby interjects. “I tried to tell Detective Fischer that, but he wouldn’t listen to me.”

“What’s her name?” he asks.

“Hayden Dawson.”

I hear the clicks of the keyboard in the background.

“I’m sorry, but I don’t show a report anywhere. Detective Fischer may not have it filed yet in the system, and until he does, there’s really nothing I can do. My advice would be to call back in the morning and talk to Fischer directly.”

“You’ve got to be shitting me. All those resources at your fingertips, and you won’t do a fucking thing? Your detective told her mother that he’ll look into it but needs to talk to me. Well, here the fuck I am. She’s not with me. Issue the fucking Amber Alert.”

“If you’re going to continue to speak to me like that, sir, I’ll have to end this call. If you call back and talk to the detective who spoke to your wife, you’ll be able to get more answers than I can give you.” I ignore his assumption that she’s my wife. If she was, this would have never happened. That was Shelby’s choice, not mine, and I’m paying the consequences now that she needs my help.

Shelby’s eyes plead with me to stop, but I can’t. I may not have known about Hayden until tonight, but Shelby’s assured me that she’s my blood, and a DNA test will prove that later. But even if she isn’t, I’m not about to sit around and let the police shove a child’s safety on the back burner. I’d been down that road myself, and no child deserves to be ignored by a system meant to protect them from shit like this.

“If you and your department don’t want to handle it, I’ll fucking do it myself,” I bellow before hanging up on the guy. “So help me, Shelby, I’m going to get her back, police or no police. I’ll do it.” Tears stream down her beautiful face, but I can’t focus on her sadness or my rage.

Focus on what you can do. Ignore how much you want to take Shelby into your arms and comfort her.

“Does she have a cell phone?”

“She does, but it wasn’t at the house. She never leaves without it.”

“What’s the number?”

Shelby hesitates. “It’s 554-0690.”

Opening my desktop, I pull up a geo-locator site I use for the club.

“Service provider?”

“T-Mobile.”

My fingers fly across the keyboard, quickly entering in the information and the provider. With a click of the enter key, the screen flashes. My heart drops.

“Her phone hasn’t connected to a cell tower since early yesterday morning.”

“Oh, God.”

“Relax, Shelby. It could mean her phone’s off or the battery’s dead. We just have to keep checking to see if it connects to a local cell tower, which will get us a close proximity of where she could be or has been. You just have to have a little faith. Let’s try her laptop.”

My attention goes immediately to the device. I flip it open and the screen lights up. Dozens of strings of green code, like a science fiction movie, cover her home screen, not all that unsimilar to my own setup. “Shit,” I mutter, glancing up at Shelby just as the log-in screen pops up with the password box.

“She knows her computers,” she confesses with admiration. “Do you think you can get into it?”

“Let me think.”

She wasn’t kidding. This girl knows her way around a computer and back again. Hayden is definitely not your ordinary twelve-year-old. A strange sense of pride tingles deep in my gut at the realization that I have a daughter who can set up a system like this.

But that means I have to break into it, and there’s only two ways I can go about it. The easy way, with Shelby giving me enough information about her for me to crack it, or the hard way, by powering it off and using command prompts to back door my way in, risking the possibility of triggering an internal hard drive wipe, taking everything I’d need with it.

“Tell me something she likes. Television shows, movies, names of her pets, anything you think she would use as a password.” My fingers dance over the keyboard, waiting for an answer.

Shelby’s lips twist to the side as she thinks. “Oh! We watch The Bachelor together.”

My head falls. “She’s twelve, and she watches that kind of shit? I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear that. What else?”

“Marvel movies. She really likes Iron Man.”

I try a couple of things: Tony Stark, Iron Man, Jarvis, Happy. I get nothing, except for a warning after the last try. We’ve only got a couple more tries before it locks me out. Shooting in the dark is now just as risky as trying to back door my way in.

“I’m going to have to try to do this a different way. It’ll take time.” Shelby’s face falls. “I wish I had a magic wand, but I don’t. If I rush this, the hard drive will be wiped, and we’ll be up shit’s creek.”

She tries to hide how anxious she is, but fails. “How long?”

“I should be able to get in there by morning. You can swing back by…” I try to get out before two of the club girls come crashing into my room.

“Hey, Hashy,” one of them coos. “You wanna party?” Both of them are drunk as hell, barely able to hold themselves up. Shelby looks between me and the girls with disgust and pain. I start to tell them to leave, but Shelby cuts me off.

“I can’t do this. I thought I could for Hayden’s sake, but I can’t.” She bolts for the door, and I try to catch up with her, but the club girls are in the fucking way. I zig and they zag in an attempt to trap me in here with them.

“Move your asses!” I snarl. They jump at the volume of my voice, and scatter from my room like mice running from an exterminator.

By the time I get around them, she’s already out the door.

“Haven’t seen a piece of ass run away from you that fast in a long time,” Karma yells out from across the room. “What did you do? Try that nerdy cosplay out as foreplay?”

“Shut up, asshole. Where’s Judge?”

“Something wrong?”

“Yeah, man. My kid’s missing.”

Karma tilts his head to the side. “You don’t have a kid.”

“An hour ago, I’d have said the same thing, but shit’s changed.”

No truer words have I ever spoken. Shit had definitely changed, and I don’t know how I feel about that.