she had done so many times over the last few months, Rachel straightened her back and forced the muscles in her face to relax into an expression that hid her grief and her anger.
“Yes, sweetie?” she said, turning around.
Sarah stood uncertainly in the doorway, rubbing her finger against her thumbnail as she often did when she was thinking.
“Why are you so mad at Micah?” she asked.
Rachel weighed that part of the truth she was willing to tell her daughter. She couldn’t tell Sarah that she had been falling in love with the man, that for the first time since her husband had died she’d felt alive and young and happy. Sarah wouldn’t understand that Micah’s friendship had been a sham. How could she? Rachel herself didn’t understand it.
Remembering the day she had hired Micah, she stared at her daughter. Never in Rachel’s wildest dreams had she imagined the carpenter with his competent hands and his dark, gentle eyes would turn out to be an undercover agent with the DEA, sent to investigate her as a possible drug dealer.
He hadn’t been her friend after all, which made her impulse to call him after the threats started all the more stupid.
The first demand for a half-million dollars had come via an e-mail, and she had deleted it, sure it was spam. The next demand had come in the mail, the plain white paper in an equally plain white envelope with no return address containing a single sentence. She’d thrown that away, too, sure that it was an awful prank, playing on all her new vulnerability. Then, a rock had been thrown through the living-room window one night, but the police had dismissed it as a random act of vandalism, probably by neighborhood kids.
Rachel had known it had something to do with the demand for money. She had been so certain of it that she had gone to see Angela in prison. Since she had been convicted of using their business to launder drug money, Rachel assumed the demands had something to do with Angela’s old activities. She had told Rachel she didn’t know a thing about a missing half-million and Rachel had left the prison that day, sure an overactive imagination had piled on top of her recent catastrophes and made her fear the very worst. She’d decided it all had to be some hideous prank, and that it was perfectly safe to let her children ride their bikes up and down the block without seeing a bogeyman behind every bush.
Rachel’s heart pounded as one realization after another sank into her. Angela had lied…again. The demand for money wasn’t some outrageous practical joke—it was real. Micah was back, which had to mean she was once again a suspect no matter what he said. His nicely put apology had to be merely for show. And somebody wanted money she knew nothing about.
“Mom?” Sarah asked, drawing Rachel’s attention away from her bleak thoughts.
“He lied to me,” she finally said. “A huge lie that I don’t think I can forgive.”
“Did he tell you he was sorry?” Sarah asked with the direct logic reserved for the very young.
Rachel nodded.
“Then, you’re supposed to forgive him,” her daughter said. “That’s what Mrs. Berrey says in Sunday school.”
It was also the advice of Rachel’s father, a retired minister.
If only forgiveness were that simple. Rachel crossed the room to her daughter, gave her a quick hug, and wondered how to answer. From the beginning she had taught her children to live by the lessons passed on to her by her father. At the core of her being she had believed, really believed, in everything she’d learned. Love thy neighbor as thyself. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. What you ask for in faith shall be given to you. Until last spring, she had been so sure those beliefs were as much a part of her as her next breath.
She’d been wrong. She had played by the rules, had lived the kind of life expected of the daughter of a minister, and she had been happy with it. But as it turned out, faith had been as hollow as promises made by her lifelong friend, Angela. Faith hadn’t protected her or her family, and it hadn’t provided an iota of comfort.
“If a person says they’re sorry, you’re supposed to say that it’s okay,” Sarah said.
“That’s very good advice.” She brushed Sarah’s bangs off her forehead and pressed a kiss there. “But it may take me a while to accept his apology.”
“I told you that he’d come back,” Sarah said.
“Yes, you did.” And each time her daughter had made the prediction, Rachel had prayed she would never see the man again.
More than ever, she knew God had turned a deaf ear to her prayers, a knowledge she had confessed to her dad one bleak night. The deaf ear, he had told her, was hers, not God’s. They had argued, and she’d felt battered by the notion that she had abandoned God when it was clearly the other way around.
Over the last few months she had lost nearly everything that had been important to her. Her business. Her reputation. Her ability to provide a comfortable living for herself and her children. Prayer hadn’t helped, and the platitudes offered by well-meaning friends cut to the quick. As for God—that serene Presence she’d felt all her life was gone as though it had never been.
She kept that to herself, though.
The last time she had voiced that thought, her dad had told her that life came down to only two choices. Move toward your Source or away from it.
“The reason you don’t feel God,” he had told her, “is because you’ve locked your heart up tight, and you’ve moved away from Him.”
“And I came here to talk to my father, hoping he’d understand at least a little bit,” she had replied. “Instead, once again, I got the minister, who doesn’t understand at all.”
That had been a long-standing argument between them, but now it seemed insurmountable. All she wanted was for her dad to comfort her, because she was still just as scared as she’d sometimes been when she was a child. The ensuing rift felt as deep as Glenwood Canyon to Rachel. Now, they no longer spoke except as it related to Sarah and Andy. She wouldn’t deny him access to his grandchildren since the three of them were his only living family.
Dragging her thoughts back to the moment, she looked down at Sarah. “Want to help me finish making dinner?”
“Okay.”
Rachel forced another smile. “Okay.”
And for an hour, she could pretend that making dinner was the biggest challenge she faced.
TWO
The following morning, Rachel headed for work, hearing her father’s voice in her head. “Be bold as a lion, Rachel,” had been his advice right after Angela’s arraignment last spring. “Only the guilty have reason to hide in the dark.” Except, she felt guilty, even if only by association.
As her dad had said to her recently, the words didn’t offer comfort. Though she still heard his voice in her head, she no longer confused it with God. Though her loss of faith had hurt her father, she couldn’t pretend to believe.
These days she related most to Job’s trials. Like the biblical figure, Rachel was sure there could be no purpose to all she had endured over the last several years—the death
