After so many years, I suppose the best explanation is…a miracle.”
He frowned at that, miracle not being in the vocabulary of a been-there, seen-every-horror FBI agent. “Ryan seemed to think that Linda still needs some kind of help. I promised to provide that.”
Violet opened her mouth, closed it, then sighed. “All right. Linda. Let’s talk about Linda. Ryan was right that she’ll need help. Ten years have passed. The world isn’t the same as Linda remembers. She’s not the same as she remembers. She’s been in a rehab facility for the past year, relearning old skills and acquiring new skills to cope with those ways in which she’s changed, but it can’t be easy.”
“Ryan said she was being released from rehab soon. He wanted me to…protect her.”
“That sounds like Ryan. But you’ll have to find out from Linda if protection is what she wants—or will accept. From what I understand, she’ll be going to the home of Nancy and Dean Armstrong, the couple who have taken care of Ricky since infancy.”
Emmett thought of the truculent Ricky and the ethereal Linda. “It doesn’t matter what she wants. I promised Ryan. It’s the least I can do for him.”
“There’s that guilt again,” Violet said. “Any woman, even one who has been in Linda’s shoes, won’t appreciate being an obligation to you.”
“She’s not an obligation. She’s a…” Compulsion. The light. Springtime. In his mind’s eye, he saw her face turned up to the sunshine and again he felt that warm weight of Ryan’s hand on his shoulder. She needed him, and he was being directed to take care of her. God, how could he explain it to Violet without her calling for the men in white coats with straitjackets? “She’s just something I know I’m supposed to do right now.”
Violet toasted him with a little dip of her coffee cup. “Then good luck convincing her of that.”
Linda consulted the notebook on her bedside table the moment she woke up. It was chubby, with a no-nonsense blue tagboard cover. Today’s place was marked with a simple paper clip. She read the words she’d penciled in the evening before to aid her in those first, often confusing moments of awakening.
Today is Tuesday, May 2.
YOUR ROOM HAS MOVED.
You live in the south wing now. Bathroom is on the right.
If it’s morning, get up, shower, dress. Go to breakfast.
Turn left for the dining hall.
Tuesday, May 2. The date hadn’t been a revelation, though the year might take her an instant or two to conjure up. She was even already aware that her room had moved. But she still kept up the habits that had gotten her through the first months at the rehabilitation facility, when blinking could cause her to lose her train of thought—or worse, a day or two of short-term memories.
She stretched, then climbed out of bed and took in the outfit she’d laid out for herself the night before. Yoga pants, T-shirt, running shoes. She had physical therapy scheduled for the late morning, which meant time on the elliptical machine and stretching on the mats. A year ago, she’d been learning to walk again; these days, she was itching to take a run on the sidewalk.
In a few days, she might do just that.
At the thought, anxiety tripped up her heart. She ignored the feeling, though, and continued into the bathroom. The rehab facility was a comfortable, comforting place, but her counselors assured her she was ready to move out into the big, bad world.
She wished they wouldn’t refer to it like that. They meant it as a joke, of course, but she didn’t find it all that funny.
In the big, bad world, she had to create a new life for herself. An independent life…well, as independent as a life could be that also contained the ten-year-old who was her son, Richard. Ricky.
She thought of him and the corners of her lips tipped up as she stepped under the shower spray. He might scare her to death—he did scare her to death—but he could still make her smile. Her fingers closed around the bar of oatmeal soap, and she brought it against her body.
And froze.
“Damn, damn, damn,” she muttered, slamming the bar back into place. Then she reached toward her knees and grasped the wet hem of her sopping nightshirt to pull it over her head. It landed in the bottom of the shower stall with a splat.
The small mistake put her in lousy mood that the bright dining hall and the excellent breakfast menu couldn’t dissipate. One of the rehab counselors noted it, apparently, because she came to sit beside Linda during her second cup of coffee.
“Bad dreams? Headache?” she asked.
Those were a couple of lingering ailments, but not today’s problem. Linda felt heat warm her cheeks. “Showered in my nightgown.”
The counselor smiled. “Is that all?”
“Isn’t that enough? What kind of grown woman steps under the spray of the shower wearing her clothes? It’s bad enough that I have to have routines to remind myself to wash and rinse my hair. Now I’m forgetting to get naked first.”
The woman leaned closer. “Don’t tell anyone, but once I came to work in my pink fuzzy slippers. When we have a lot on our minds, sometimes we let the simple things slip by.”
But how was she supposed to be independent, let alone a mother, if she couldn’t remember the simple things?
The other woman must have read the question on her face. “You handled the situation, didn’t you, Linda? You recognized the error, coped with it. That’s all any of us can ask of ourselves.”
Linda had never been a whiner, but still… “It was a shower,” she muttered. “You’d think I could get that right.”
“Is there something else bothering you, Linda? Some worry? You know that can put you off your game.”
Linda drummed her fingertips against the tabletop. A few months back, she hadn’t had the dexterity to do such a thing. The hours of drilling with computer games had paid off. “It’s…it’s a man,” she admitted.
“Ryan Fortune?” The counselor rubbed Linda’s shoulder. “Grief is perfectly normal, too.”
Linda gave a vague nod. She did grieve for Ryan. He’d been a gentle friend to her, like a kindly uncle, and he’d given her a much-needed anchor in those first months after she came fully, miraculously conscious. It had been Ryan who had found this wonderful facility, and had paid for it. It had been Ryan who, she learned a few days after his death, had set up trusts for both herself and her son that gave them financial security for the rest of their lives.
“But it’s a different man I’m thinking of,” she told the counselor. Her hand automatically reached for her notebook and flipped it open to the most recent page. It was what she’d written after the breakfast reminder.
9:00 a.m., you have a meeting with the Armstrongs…
The Armstrongs were another miracle in her life. After Ricky’s birth, Ryan had met the couple through the Mothers Against Drunk Driving organization. They’d lost their daughter, son-in-law and granddaughter
