Arden looked up at him, and though their gazes held for only a moment he was able to see first confusion and then a hint of gratitude. He smiled, but she didn’t smile back. He didn’t blame her. Sometimes you couldn’t make yourself smile no matter how much you might want to. Sometimes you simply forgot how.
“Come on, sweetie,” Mrs. Wilkes said, motioning toward her car. “Let’s go home.”
Arden preceded her mom, moving quickly, seeming to want to be anywhere but standing in front of the gas station. Mrs. Wilkes glanced at him, mouthed a silent “Thank you,” and hurried to the car. She looked almost as shaken as her daughter. The weeks since they’d received word of Arden’s abduction had no doubt been hard on the Wilkeses. Arden’s father had even suffered a heart attack.
He shook his head as he watched their car head down the street, not wanting to think about what Arden may have endured at the hands of her captors. She was home now, and hopefully she’d find a way to move beyond it and heal. He knew from experience that people were resilient, that they could get past a lot of bad stuff. It just took time and support.
Stepping away from memories of the past and toward the present, where he had work to do, he strode toward his truck, slipped into the driver’s seat and pointed his pickup toward home.
When he pulled into the ranch, his memory traveled back in time to when he’d first seen the place. To a scared five-year-old, it had seemed impossibly huge. He’d been one part frightened and one part mesmerized. The mesmerized part still hit him on occasion, twenty-seven years later. He couldn’t imagine a place feeling more like home if he’d been conceived and born here.
He parked and even before his booted feet hit the gravel, Maggie, the family’s Australian shepherd, was there to greet him, tail wagging with the kind of enthusiasm that would make more sense if he’d been gone for weeks rather than a couple of hours.
“Hey, girl,” he said as he scratched her between the ears. “You miss me?”
“Stop spoiling that dog,” Sloane said from the low limestone porch. “We all already know she loves you most.”
He smiled at his sister. “What can I say? The dog has taste.”
Sloane made a rude sound then strode toward the back of his truck. “You get everything?”
“No, I just went to town and shot the bull with the morning crowd at the Primrose.”
“Well, I hope you all at least finally solved some of the world’s problems.”
His thoughts shifted to Arden as he saw his mom rounding the house, obviously returning from working in her garden. The world certainly did have plenty of problems, and Arden had been caught up in them.
“No, but I did see Arden Wilkes.”
The expression on Sloane’s face changed from sibling irritation to concern. “How did she seem?”
“A nervous wreck.” He relayed what had happened in the store.
“That poor girl,” his mom said, having joined them when she’d heard Arden’s name mentioned. “I hope they got the monsters who took her and they pay.”
His mother wasn’t a vindictive woman, but she believed in justice.
“The news report I saw said at least some of them were killed during the rescue,” Sloane said.
Good riddance. Anyone who bought and sold other humans, including children, didn’t deserve to breathe the same air as decent people.
“I heard some of the city leaders want to honor her at the rodeo this weekend, give her a hero’s welcome home,” his mom said.
“That doesn’t seem like a very good idea.” When his mom and Sloane gave him eerily similar questioning looks, he said, “From what I saw, she’s not ready for that.”
“Well, her mother will no doubt run interference for her,” his mom said. “I wouldn’t be surprised if Molly isn’t up for it either. She and Ken have been through so much the past several weeks.” She placed her hand on Sloane’s upper arm and gave Neil a look full of motherly love. “If something like that ever happened to one of my children, I’d lose my mind.”
“No, you wouldn’t,” he said, absolutely certain of his words. “You’re the strongest woman I know. You’d probably be on the first plane to wherever we were and you’d kick butt and take names.”
His mom laughed a little. “Now there’s a mental image. Well, go on, you two, scoot. I’m sure there’s something needs doing around here.”
He helped Sloane unload the new pup tents she was going to use for one of her camps for underprivileged kids. Sloane could seem no-nonsense sometimes, was definitely opinionated, but she had a soft spot for kids, especially ones who didn’t have much positivity in their lives. If she ever met someone, got married and had kids of her own, she’d be a great mom. She took after Diane Hartley in so many ways, even though they didn’t share one speck of DNA.
“What do you think happened to Arden?” she asked when they’d finished unloading and stood cooling off in the shade of a massive live oak tree.
A vision of the terrified look in Arden’s eyes before she’d attempted to hide it formed in his mind.
“Nothing good.”
* * *
ARDEN FELT LIKE a complete and utter fool as her mom drove them toward the house. She wanted to beat her fist against the passenger side door to release some of the anger over what her captors had done to her state of mind. She was not this person, one who damn near screamed bloody murder because someone dropped a coffeepot.
“It’ll be okay, sweetie,” her mom said.
“I know.” In fact, she didn’t know, but she didn’t want to worry her mother any more than she already had. At the moment she couldn’t even look at her mom. Though she heard the sympathy and concern in her mom’s voice, Arden knew if she saw it right now she wouldn’t be able to hold back tears.
When they popped over the hill that gave Arden her first view of her parents’ home, a lump rose in her throat. How many pitch-black nights had she slept in her cage imagining she was in the safe comfort of her childhood bedroom instead? It had seemed impossibly far away, but now it sat in front of her. The modest home, the elm tree that still held her tire swing, the little pond filled with ducks and flanked by a bench where she and her dad would sit and watch the ducks together.
And then she saw him, and she had to bite her lip to keep from making a twisted sound of relief and distress. When she’d found out a couple of days ago that her father had suffered a heart attack shortly after she’d been taken, she’d been swamped with the fear that she’d never see him again. Now there he sat in one of the rockers on the porch next to his sister, Emily.
He must have seen them at the same time because he and Emily stood, and he didn’t act like a man who’d had a heart attack as he left the porch and was halfway to her mom’s parking spot before her mom even got the car put into Park.
Arden’s legs shook as she stepped from the car, and she felt her tears demanding to be set free. Despite the
