Beautiful Lie the Dead by Barbara Fradkin

couldn’t stand going back with her, Mike. Not after—”
    â€œBut she’s your mother.”
    â€œIs she?”
    Startled, Green laughed. “Of course! Of that I’m sure. I wasn’t sure of much else back in those days, but I remember your birth. Your mother was as far from pretty dresses and perfect hair as you can imagine. She sweated and cursed and howled in pain to have you, and when you finally decided to come out—ass first, I might add—she loved you from the first second she held you in her arms. We both did.”
    Hannah stared into her wine glass. She was still, as if the air was too thick to breathe. Green waited, understanding her well enough now to know she was hard at work behind the stillness.
    â€œFuck,” she muttered eventually.
    â€œIt doesn’t have to be for long,” he said. “A week, maybe?”
    â€œI don’t want to miss Hanukkah,” she said, still not looking at him. “Who knows how long Zaydie...”
    There was no need to finish the thought. It was one he himself thought almost every day. His father was eighty-eight, with a feeble heart and failing lungs, facing each cold winter even frailer than the last.
    â€œWell,” he said cheerfully, “that’s the great thing about Hanukkah. It’s eight days long.”

FIVE
    O nly the faintest blush of pink smudged the horizon up ahead as Green drove eastward along the Queensway towards East Division Station. Traffic was light, but he winced at the long line of headlights inching into town in the opposite direction. He would be coming back that way in less than an hour.
    He held a coffee in his right hand and balanced a bagel against the steering wheel with his left, trying to avoid smearing cream cheese or spilling black coffee onto his pants. He’d left home at this ungodly hour because he was determined to catch Adam Jules before he got busy with his day. Before his old mentor could dodge him one more time. He knew Jules lived alone in a high-rise condo downtown, but in all the twenty-five years he’d known the man, Green had never been privy to his home address or phone number. As far as Green knew, no one in the police department knew, except the senior brass.
    Green had had a restless night interrupted by dreams of his ex-wife spiriting Hannah away from him just as she had eighteen years earlier, smashing the fragile affection that had been building between them. Adam Jules was in the dream too, much younger and new to the department, still possessed of his slight French Canadian accent. He had been chastising Green for neglecting his baby daughter and lecturing him that a police officer who was not grounded in family love would ultimately crash and burn on the punishing front lines of Major Crimes.
    This was a peculiar sentiment coming from Jules. Even more peculiar, Jules was animated, even passionate.
    Green awoke from the dream unsettled and confused. After a quarter century picking up the detritus of mankind’s more brutal clashes, he’d grown used to bizarre dreams. His subconscious at work, cleansing his soul. Vicious criminals resurfaced in his dreams along with poignant victims and unlikely heroes, all intermingled during sleep in startling new ways. He’d learned to accept the wild rides through his subconscious without questioning. Actors in his dream dramas were seldom who they seemed.
    In all those years, though, Jules had never been anything but quiet and still, a ghost-like constant in the emotional chaos around him. In reality, Jules had never admonished him for neglecting Hannah. They had barely known each other back then, Jules a new sergeant in Major Crimes and Green an undisciplined young uniform grappling with his first undeserving death, a naked toddler drowned in the family pool. Green had been the one with the passion. Outrage that the parents were passed out on the couch after a night of partying. Horror that they blamed