“Mom?” Ben asked, shocked and delighted at the same time. “Mean?”
“It wasn’t ever her idea,” Lucy said. “It was always Mia and me.”
An apology rose to her lips but she swallowed it. Those little pranks had been righteous retribution for what Walter had let Vicki do to Jack when they were all kids. Lucy and Mia had hidden his things and felt like Robin Hood, righting wrongs.
“Did you think I didn’t know?” Walter asked, raising his eyes to look directly at her.
Lucy blinked. “Did you…I mean…you never said anything. Or stopped us.”
“I could hear you giggling while I dug through the hay for my hat. I knew what you were doing.” His blue eyes were less runny and more startling these days. More piercing. “And why.”
Lucy broke eye contact first, discomfited by the vulnerability she saw in him. Yesterday Mia had said that Walter had paid for all his crimes and Lucy had dismissed the notion.
But maybe she’d been wrong.
A week went by, and at Jeremiah’s appointment with Dr. Gilman he felt compelled to confess why he’d canceled the previous Saturday.
“Would you like to reschedule our meetings to a different day?” she asked.
“No. Saturday’s fine.”
“But if you’re going to be dating…?” She trailed off suggestively, nothing but hope and approval in her face. Jeremiah couldn’t meet her eyes, so he stared at his hands, ran his thumb over a cut on his palm.
“I’m not dating—”
“Do you want to talk about this?”
“No.”
“Jeremiah—”
“No. I don’t.”
It had been bad enough seeing Lucy the last week. She’d surprised him Thursday when he came to pick up his nephew, sitting cross-legged at Walter’s feet beside Ben, a pile of reins between them.
He’d thought it was a one-off. There simply was no way Lucy was going to hang out with Walter and Ben every day. But yesterday, when he’d driven up, she was there laughing at something Walter had said. Her head had been tipped back, revealing her throat, pale pink and elegant, her hair a black spill over her green shirt.
Ben and Walter were staring at her like she was the sun and they’d just come out of a cave.
He’d known exactly how they felt.
And he’d wondered if she was doing it on purpose. Some kind of ploy to get him to reconsider their breakup. A way to get under his skin.
“How is Ben doing?” Dr. Gilman asked.
Jeremiah didn’t know how to answer that. There were no more tantrums. The running away had stopped, too. Yesterday his teacher had said that Ben was starting to take part in class discussions. Raising his hand even.
Which was all great, but there was this obsessive collecting of stories and pictures. He was like an emotional hoarder. It couldn’t be healthy.
“He cries at night,” Jeremiah said. “I can hear him through his door.”
“Makes sense,” Dr. Gilman said. “He’s grieving.”
“Yeah, but how long does this last?”
Dr. Gilman put down her notebook and stared at him. The intensity in her gaze felt like a razor against his skin. Sensing danger, his balls curled up into his belly.
“Have you grieved?” Dr. Gilman asked.
“For my sister? Yeah. Of course.” Cried like a baby through her funeral. Boxed up her clothes and sobbed. Had to call Cynthia to help him.
“No. Have you grieved for your old life? For the rodeo? For the life you lived before you took over the care for the boys?”
His stomach oozed down into his legs and his brain felt too light, his skin painfully tight. Panicked, suddenly shaking with adrenaline, he glanced up at the clock.
“Time’s up, Dr. Gilman.”
“Jeremiah—?”
But he didn’t stop. Didn’t listen. He grabbed his hat from the empty stand by the door and slipped out the door.
But his stomach stayed in his leaden legs and his skin itched like it wanted to come off.
Another week went by and Lucy found herself, every day, gathering steam, pulling herself from the black hole the last year had buried her in.
And every morning she woke up expecting this to be the day she was ready to leave. To head, if not back to Los Angeles, then in some new direction. On some new adventure.
But instead her eyes opened on the familiar bedspread, the familiar sun falling through her window. The sound of her mother and sister talking in the kitchen gave her that heady sense of home that she’d been missing for five years, despite having her mother with her that entire time in Los Angeles.
This, her heart seemed to say. Here.
It wasn’t to say the situation was perfect. She needed her own space, an apartment, maybe in town. And she’d cut off her own arm for some sushi. And a proper latte. But she had peace and quiet, privacy to work, wide-open spaces to walk. Honest work when her head got tired of designing—a heretofore unheard-of balance in her life that was unexpectedly and deliciously satisfying.