shouldn’t have told you. I’m sorry, Claire. You need your strength to recover, not to worry about Maura and the rest of us left to grieve with her.”
She wept then, noisy, painful tears that clogged her throat and burned her eyes and hurt her heart. Through it all, Riley held her hand in both of his, looking tortured. She wanted him to hug her as he’d done that day in the store, but she knew he couldn’t, not with her casted arm awkward and heavy between them.
He handed her the box of tissues and she must have used half of them before the storm of tears gave way to a deep, primal ache.
“How is your family?” she finally asked.
“Hanging in. We McKnights are tough, but this is…”
“Unimaginable.”
“Yeah.”
“I’m sorry, Ri. This isn’t what you expected.”
“No, I’m—”
Whatever he was going to say was cut off when the door swung wide and her mother bustled in carrying one of Claire’s beaded bags and her arms loaded with magazines and books.
Ruth stopped in the doorway and did a double take Claire might have found funny if she hadn’t been staggering under the weight of her grief for Layla.
“What do you think you’re doing here?”
Riley blinked a little at Ruth’s outrage, then he shuttered any expression.
“Visiting Claire. I thought she might want to know the status of the investigation into the break-in at her store.”
Claire didn’t care anymore. She would have gladly endured the violation and outrage of hundreds of burglaries if it meant Layla could still be alive, with her black-painted fingernails and the mascara she would layer on with a trowel.
Ruth squinted at Claire and the scattered tissues on top of the blanket. She advanced on Riley, her features furious. “You told her, didn’t you?”
This was what her mother had been keeping from her, Claire realized finally, why she was drawn and upset. She had said nothing to Claire yesterday, had prevented Jeff from telling her, as well.
“Yes,” Riley answered. “She asked. I answered.”
“You had no right. No right!”
“Why didn’t you tell me, Mother? Maura is my friend. Alex is my best friend. I needed to know. You shouldn’t have tried to keep it from me.”
Ruth bristled and looked offended, an expression she wore with comfortable familiarity. “I didn’t want to upset you. You’ve been through a terrible ordeal.”
“A few broken bones, which will heal,” Claire shot back. “I didn’t lose a child!”
Ruth aimed another vitriolic look at Riley. If her mother hadn’t already disliked him, she would loathe him now for going against her misguided wishes.
“What good does it do for you to know right now? You would find out soon enough. Look at how upset you are.”
Ruth would never understand that Claire was angry at her for withholding the information, not at Riley. With her classic myopia, her mother could always figure out a way to make herself the injured party in any conflict, so why bother trying to explain?
“I’d better go. I’ve got to head down to the station.”
He seemed so different from the teasing, flirtatious man who had come into her store after the robbery and her heart ached. “I’m so sorry, Riley,” she murmured, knowing the words were grossly inadequate, but they were all she had available. “Thank you again for everything that night.”
“I’m glad you’re doing better. Take care of yourself, Claire.”
She nodded and watched him go, then settled in to face an exhausting day of busybody nurses and poking, prodding doctors and, worse, having to cope with her mother.
“ARE YOU SURE YOU’RE okay back there?” Jeff met her gaze in the rearview mirror.
Claire shifted on the backseat of his Escalade, trying to ignore the pain shooting through her muscles with every rotation of the tires.
She hugged Owen to her and reached across his back to hold Macy’s hand. What were a few bumps in the road when she finally had her children close?
“I’m fine. It’s only a fifteen-minute drive anyway.”
“You really should have taken the front seat.” Seated beside Jeff, Holly leaned around the headrest and gave Claire a stern look.
She was absolutely right but Claire refused to give her the satisfaction of agreeing. It had been stupid to insist on taking the backseat, where she didn’t have nearly enough leg room for a cast. She had to stop literally bending herself in half to make everyone else happy.
“But then I would have missed the chance to sit by the kids and I’ve missed them like crazy.”
She forced a smile and somehow managed to keep it from wobbling away when Jeff hit one of the town’s legendary late-spring potholes and the subsequent lurch sent her meager hospital lunch sloshing around her insides.
It was only the pain pills making her nauseated, she knew. That and the fact that she was actually in motion again after being confined to her hospital room for nearly five days.
“It looks as if most of the snow has finally melted.”
Indeed, with the capriciousness of a Rocky Mountain spring, the temperature during her brief trip from the wide hospital front doors to Jeff’s backseat had been mild and pleasant. Outside the car window, she saw children playing on muddy lawns already beginning to turn a pale green and as Jeff turned onto Blue Sage Road, she enjoyed the sight of the bright yellow and red tulips beginning to bud in Caroline Bybee’s always-spectacular garden.
“It’s about time,” Macy groused. “It seems like winter went on forever this year.”
“I know, right,” Holly said. “I mean, Sunday is Easter and everything. I was thinking we’d have to hide eggs in the snow this year.”
That wasn’t an uncommon occurrence in Claire’s memory. In the high Rockies, Hope’s Crossing had been known to see heavy snowstorms into late May, but usually by the first of April, most of the remaining snow was up at the higher elevation of the ski resort.
“I’m glad it’s warmer today, for Maura’s sake,” she murmured.
Except for those children they passed, the streets appeared quiet, almost deserted. Most of the year-round residents of Hope’s Crossing would be at the funeral for Layla Parker. Ruth was there, which was the sole reason Holly and Jeff were the designated drivers taking Claire from the hospital to home.
Her mother couldn’t miss the funeral, not when she’d been friends with Mary Ella since they were girls. Claire understood that and had chosen to bite her lip and say nothing when Ruth arranged with Jeff and Holly to take her home from the hospital without
