scholarship out of concern for your mother or some kind of misguided guilt over your dad’s death.”
Josh’s color rose and he set his utensils down carefully on his plate. “It’s my scholarship, Uncle Ross. If I want to give it up, nobody else can stop me. You keep forgetting I’m not a kid anymore. I’ll be eighteen in a week, remember?”
“I haven’t forgotten. But I also know that you have opportunities ahead of you and it would be a crime to waste those. I won’t let you do it.”
“Good luck trying to stop me, if that’s what I decide to do,” Josh snapped.
Ross opened his mouth to answer just as hotly but Josh’s cell phone suddenly bleated a sappy little tune he recognized as being the one Josh had programmed to alert him to Lyndsey’s endless phone calls.
He didn’t know whether to be annoyed or grateful for the interruption. He had dealt with his own stubborn younger brothers enough to know that yelling wasn’t going to accomplish anything but would make Josh dig in his heels.
“Hey,” Josh said into the phone. He shifted his body away and pitched his voice several decibels lower. “No. Not the best right now.”
Ross’s gaze met Julie’s and the memory of their conversation earlier—and all his worries—came flooding back. Was it possible Lyndsey was part of the reason Josh was considering giving up his scholarship?
Josh held the phone away from his ear. “Uncle Ross, I’m done with dinner. Do you care if I take this inside, in my room? A friend of mine needs some help with, um, trig homework. I might be a while and I wouldn’t want to bore you two with a one-sided conversation.”
He and Julie both knew that wasn’t true. He wondered if he should call Josh on the lie, but he wasn’t eager to add to the tension over college.
“Did you get enough to eat?”
Josh made a face. “Yeah, Mom.”
Ross supposed that was just what he sounded like. Not that he had much experience with maternal solicitude. “I guess you can go.”
The teen was gone before the words were even out of his mouth. Only after the sliding door closed behind him did Ross suddenly realize his nephew’s defection left him alone with Julie.
“You know, lots of parents establish a no-call zone during the dinner hour,” Julie said mildly.
He bristled for about ten seconds before he sighed. Hardly anybody had a cell phone twenty years ago, the last time he’d been responsible for a teenager. The whole internet, e-mail, cell phone thing presented entirely new challenges.
“Frannie always insisted he leave it in his room during dinner.”
She opened her mouth to say something but quickly closed it again and returned her attention to her plate.
“What were you going to say?” he pressed.
“Nothing.”
“You forget, I’m a trained investigator. I know when people are trying to hide things from me.”
She gave him a sidelong look, then sighed. “Fine. But feel free to tell me to mind my own business.”
“Believe me. I have no problem whatsoever telling people that.”
She gave a slight smile, but quickly grew serious. “I was only thinking that a little more consistency with the house rules he’s always known might be exactly what Josh needs right now. He’s in complete turmoil. He’s struggling with his mother’s arrest and his father’s death. Despite their uneasy relationship, Lloyd was his father and having a parent die isn’t easy for anyone. Perhaps a little more constancy in his life will help him feel not quite as fragmented.”
“So many things have been ripped from his world right now. It’s all chaos. I was just trying to cut him a little slack.”
She stood and began clearing the dishes away. “Believe it or not, a little slack might very well be the last thing he needs right now. Rules provide structure and order amid the chaos, Ross.”
He could definitely understand that. He had craved that very structure in his younger days and had found it at the Academy. Police work, with its regulations and discipline—its paperwork and routine—had given him guidance and direction at a time he desperately needed some.
Maybe she was right. Maybe Josh craved those same things.
“Here, I’ll take those,” he said to Julie when she had filled a tray with the remains of their dinner.
After he carried the tray into the kitchen, he returned to the patio to find Julie standing on the edge of the tile, gazing up at the night sky.
It was a clear night, with a bright sprawl of stars. Ross joined her, wondering if he could remember the last time he had taken a chance to stargaze.
“Pretty night,” he said, though all he could think about was the lovely woman standing beside him with her face lifted up to the moonlight.
“It is,” she murmured. “I can’t believe I sometimes get so wrapped up in my life that I forget to enjoy it.”
They were quiet for a long time, both lost in their respective thoughts while the sweet scents from Frannie’s garden swirled around them.
“Can I ask you something?” Ross finally asked.
If he hadn’t been watching her so closely, he might have missed the slight wariness that crept into her expression. “Sure.”
“How do you know all this stuff? About grieving and discipline and how to help a kid who’s hurting?”
“I’m a trained youth counselor with a master’s degree in social work and child and family development.”
She was silent for a long moment, the only sound in the night the distant hoot of an owl and the wind sighing in the treetops. “Beyond that,” she finally said softly, “I know what it is to be lost and hurting. I’ve been there.”
Her words shivered through him, to the dark and quiet place he didn’t like to acknowledge, that place where he was still ten years old, scared and alone and responsible for his three younger siblings yet again after Cindy ran off with a new boyfriend for a night that turned into another and then another.
He knew lost and hurting. He had been there plenty of times before, but it didn’t make him any better at intuitively sensing what was best for Josh.
He pushed those memories aside. It was much easier to focus on the mystery of Julie Osterman than on the past he preferred to forget.
“What are your secrets?” he asked.
“You mean you haven’t run a background check on me yet, detective?”
He laughed a little at her arch tone. “I didn’t think about it until just this moment. Good idea, though.” He studied her for a long moment in the moonlight, noting the color that had crept along the delicate planes of her cheekbones. “If I did, what would I find?”
“Nothing
