where Annie had been the day her father had shot himself. Avoiding that part of the school grounds where she’d heard the news, she unlatched her laptop from the bike carrier—theft happened even in River Bluff, if you made the temptation great enough—and left her yellow ten-speed unlocked in the rack with a dozen other bikes.
Becky wasn’t in her office.
Nor was she in the lunchroom. Or the teachers’ lounge.
Fifteen minutes of her friend’s lunch break had already passed and Annie had no idea where to look next.
“Hi, Ms. Kincaid.”
“How you doing, Katie? Tell your mom thanks for the apple jelly. It was great!”
“I will.” The blond senior smiled as she continued on her way down the hall, and then turned. “You wouldn’t happen to know where Shane is, would you?”
“I hope in class,” Annie said, wondering why the girl would be asking about a boy who was three years younger than she was. Wondering, too, why the girls here all thought it was okay to expose themselves in those extremely low cut pants and two-inch shirts.
And when had Katie gotten that butterfly tattooed on her lower back? Her mother must have shed some tears over that.
SHE FOUND BECKY IN HER silver Tahoe—sitting alone in a parking lot filled to capacity with cars, but no people.
One look at the tears on her friend’s face and Annie opened the passenger door without waiting for an invitation.
“What’s wrong?” she asked, sliding in and closing her door with a quick jerk on the inside handle.
“Oh.” Becky gave her an embarrassed glance, sniffled and made a swipe at her face, as if she could erase the evidence of her distress. “Hi. I didn’t know you were here.”
Annie frowned. If someone had hurt her friend…
“I’ve been thinking about you all morning,” Becky said, her attempt at a smile weak at best. “Tell me how it went.”
As far as Annie was concerned, her trials and tribulations were a low priority at the moment.
“What’s wrong, Bec?” Her friend’s auburn curls had pulled loose from the ponytail she always wore when she worked.
Naturally curly hair was only one of the many things Annie and Becky Howard had in common.
“I just sent a student to a hospital in San Antonio for tests.”
Annie’s skin grew cold. “Is it serious?”
“I think he has an ulcer. He’s been vomiting blood.”
Staring at Becky’s bent head, Annie tried to read her friend’s mind. Certainly a sixteen-or seventeen-year-old with an ulcer had a serious problem. It would be indicative of some pretty severe emotional struggles, if nothing else. But it was still treatable.
She’d watched Becky work a car accident one time on the side of the road; they’d passed just after the crash occurred, and had stopped to see if they could help. One young man had died, but Becky had saved the life of another.
And she’d never shed a tear.
“So what’s really wrong?”
Becky looked up, and her eyes filled with fresh tears.
“I just saw Luke coming out of the grocery store. I wanted yogurt for lunch.”
Damn. “They don’t have yogurt in the cafeteria?”
“Not strawberry banana.”
“Did he say something?” Annie asked gently. Becky was the most loving person she’d ever known. Luke’s leaving town to join the army sixteen years before, walking out on Becky and their love affair so abruptly, without a backward glance, had nearly destroyed her friend. And just as abruptly, a month ago, he’d returned to town.
“No…” Becky’s voice trailed off. “I didn’t give him a chance.”
“Do you think he saw you?”
“He looked straight at me.” Becky’s lips trembled. “I can’t believe this, Annie,” she said with a deep shudder. “I got over Luke Chisum years ago. I want nothing to do with him. And still, seeing him out of the blue like that, I turn to mush.”
Annie wanted to believe that a girl could get over her first love. Even if he had been the knight-in-shining-armor kind.
“It’s just that, seeing him up close…”
Remembering her first sight of Blake, two years before, when he’d stepped off that plane, Annie felt her own throat tighten. “Aw, hon.” She hated seeing her friend hurt. “I’m sorry.”
Becky sniffled and blew her nose.
“It gets easier,” Annie murmured, though she wasn’t as certain of that this morning as she might have been the day before.
Becky nodded. “It has to, doesn’t it?”
Annie sure as hell hoped so.
“He’s got this tiny scar by his left eye….”
“From the helicopter crash?”
“I don’t know, but probably. It’s still a little pink, so it has to be fresh.” She paused, glanced out the windshield and then looked back at Annie, her eyes filled with tenderness —and pain. “I just can’t stop thinking about him over there in Iraq, about all the things we hear about that place. About the crash. What if he’d been taken hostage?”
Grabbing her friend’s hand, Annie gave it a squeeze. “Don’t let those demons get you, Bec,” she said. “You’ll drive yourself crazy.”
And Annie, more than most, knew the truth of this. “Cole says he’s fine,” she continued. “Still the same old joking-around Luke.”
“All that joking covers a lot.”
Annie didn’t doubt it. Luke Chisum had been home only a month and already he was taking his father to therapy, doing everything he could to make his mother’s life easier, doing his share at the family ranch—in spite of an older brother who treated him with open hostility every chance he got.
“Still, other than some color blindness due to damage to the optic nerve, he seems to have completely recovered.”
Becky tried to smile. And failed. “Do you know how long he was at Walter Reed?”
The amount of time he’d spent in the veterans’ hospital would give a medical professional like Becky a fairly good idea of the extent of Luke’s injuries.
“I don’t.” Annie hesitated, thought and then continued, “I know that he got a medical discharge, though. With his vision the way it is, he wouldn’t meet army regulations.”
“I wondered,” Becky
