care?”
“She was at home.” His voice was clipped.
“With your father.”
“Yes.”
“Did he leave his house after? Sell it?”
A muscle flexed in his jaw. “No.”
“And you still visit your dad there. At the house where you and your brother and sisters grew up.”
“Apples and oranges, Laurel. My father didn’t—” His teeth snapped together. “God. What is it about you that pushes me right off the edge of reason?”
She crossed her arms, stung. “Why don’t you just finish it, Sheriff? Your father didn’t kill your mother. And you believe—just like your predecessor, Sheriff Wicks—that my father killed mine. Well, he didn’t. Her death was an accident.” She dropped her arms and stepped closer to him, forcing the words past her tight throat. “I may have been stuck in a straitjacket five-hundred miles away, but even I knew the charges against my father were dropped. Sheriff Wicks obviously changed his mind. So why can’t you?”
“You were never in a straitjacket.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I visited you there.”
Shock reared her back. “I…what?”
He stepped past her, pacing the close confines between the faded couch and the equally faded rocking chair. He rounded the back of the couch. Stopped. Closed his palms over the back of it. “Guess I don’t have to ask if you remember that.”
She stared at him. His fingertips were white where they sunk into the faded floral upholstery.
“You…saw me there. At Fernwood.”
“Three times a week for three months.”
She couldn’t breathe. Her lips parted, but she simply could not draw a breath. She sat down on the rocker and pressed her forehead to her hands.
Everything she’d thought about him for all these years tilted.
She finally dragged oxygen into her lungs. “I didn’t know.”
“There was a sunroom there. Plenty of windows. A lot of fake palm trees planted in pots.”
She didn’t even have to close her eyes to recall the room. To this day she preferred any tree other than a palm. “It overlooked a parking lot. The nurses tried to brighten it up with the plants.”
“Right.”
She remembered the room, remembered so much of Fernwood.
But not his visits.
Which meant he’d been there only at the first. She knew, because she’d been told, that she’d been moved to Fernwood within a month of her mother’s death. But the time between that and the wintry morning when she’d sat looking out at the falling snow and her mind had just…clicked on again…had been nearly six months.
“Your father told you I was at Fernwood, I suppose.” She wasn’t sure how she felt about that. She knew Beau had been instrumental in getting her placed at Fernwood, a private mental health facility outside of Denver, where she received more care than she would have through the system in Lucius.
“Holly told me. She came to visit me at seminary. Came to give me a piece of her mind, actually, for going for weeks on end without calling home. That’s when I learned what your father had done. What had happened…to you. After I’d dropped you off that evening, I picked up my suitcase from the house and kept driving. I didn’t know about any of it until Holly came to see me in California.”
She pressed her fingertips into her eye sockets. “My father didn’t do anything.”
“Then you remember that? You remember what happened that day, but not the hours you and I spent sitting in that bloody sunroom at Fernwood.”
“I remember enough!” She dropped her hands, staring at him. Wondering why the pain of it was as sharp as it was, when time was supposed to dull this sort of thing. “You slept with me in Calhoun’s barn, and then you dumped me, and after you drove me back to my house—insisted on it, in fact—I arrived in just enough time to see my mother accidentally fall down the stairs. I don’t care what everyone said. My father did not push her.”
“Because you remember it.”
Her eyes burned. The truth was that she didn’t remember anything beyond the sight of Shane driving away in that old pickup truck while she stood on the porch, silently crying. “My father wouldn’t have hurt my mother.”
“Did you ever talk to him after you left Lucius?”
The question came like a slap. “Yes.” Often, once she left Fernwood. Then over the years dwindling down to just once a year. On his birthday. Calling him more often might have been the right thing to do, but she hadn’t been able to bear the constant disappointment.
“And? What’d he say?”
“What does it matter to you? It wasn’t a confession, I promise you that.” She knew her father would never have made such a confession. Not to her. Not to anyone.
He had been a miserable man, but he hadn’t been an abusive one. No matter what the rumors around Lucius had said.
She ought to know.
She’d lived under his roof.
He’d often raised his voice, but he’d never once raised his hand.
That had been her mother’s particular domain.
“Laurel.” Shane’s voice went soft. Careful. Gentle. “I’m just trying to—”
Coddling.
She hated it.
“He told me not to come home to Lucius,” she said baldly. “So I didn’t. He never came to visit me. His actions were perfectly clear. He didn’t want to be around me. But now he’s gone and what he wanted doesn’t matter anymore. I’m here whether you like it or not.”
“I don’t want you to get hurt again.”
“There’s nothing in this house that can hurt me.”
“Hurt doesn’t have to be physical.”
She knew that as well as anyone.
And she was still grappling with the revelation that he’d visited her at Fernwood. “I’ll be fine.”
Something came and went in his eyes. “I guess I’ll be close enough by to make sure of it.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
He merely straightened and rounded the couch, stopping in front of her. “Come with me.”
Wariness
