happened to playing with Barbie dolls?” he asked plaintively.
Amusement lightened Julia’s distress, if only for a moment. “What’s she doing?” When he told her, she laughed. “Oh, she still has her Barbies and plays with them, too, but mostly by herself. She’s not sure which friends will think it’s totally uncool and childish.”
“She’s ten.”
“Almost eleven. Sixth grade is in the middle school, you know. There’ll be dances.”
“Older boys,” he said with the voice of doom.
He expected her to laugh again, but she didn’t. “Alec, I think I need to take the kids away from L.A. You’re so important to them.” She bit her lip. “To me, too. That’s why I’ve been so reluctant to do this. But you know my parents would like to have me close, and I have to believe Matt would do better in a small town.”
The small town where she’d grown up was on a lake somewhere north of Minneapolis. Half the country away. More than half.
Alec felt sick. He had the impending awareness of devastation. In a distant part of his mind, he’d known he loved his niece and nephew, and, sure, Julia, too, as much as he dared let himself. When Josh had been killed in Afghanistan, Alec had naturally stepped in, assuming some of his brother’s responsibilities. Julia and the kids were family. That was what a man did.
Until this moment, he hadn’t understood that they were the three people he loved most in the world. He didn’t know how he could survive without them.
“Your mother drives you crazy,” he heard himself say hoarsely.
“I wouldn’t move in with them. I’d get us our own place.” Her face was pinched as she searched his face. “What would you suggest? That I close my eyes and stab a pin into a map, pick someplace to go at random?”
For a second he had double vision, those red pins floating before his eyes, and he thought with an astonishing burst of anguish, Julia. What if somehow, someway, that creep came across her? Los Feliz, the part of L.A. where she and Alec both lived, was upscale. She was pure class and beautiful. He—whoever he was—would like her. Want her. Hate her.
She and the kids would be better off, safer, away from overcrowded, smoggy, crime-ridden Southern California.
This was the moment when Alec realized he would do anything at all for her, Matt and Liana. Anything for them, and to keep them in his life even if he was painfully aware he was destined to remain on the outside looking in.
“We’ll pick somewhere,” he said. “I should be able to get a job running a police department in a peaceful small town somewhere. Don’t go home to your parents. Let’s stay together.”
The shock in her green-gold eyes was such that, for a terrifying instant, he thought he’d blown it. And then those eyes filled with tears. “I can’t ask you—”
“I’m offering.” He couldn’t let himself touch her, so he didn’t move. “I’m ready for a change, Julia.”
She pressed fingers to her lips, laughing and crying at the same time. “Oh, God. If you mean it...”
All the fear left him in a rush. “I mean it. I’ll go online and start looking tonight. I’ll let you know where I find possible job openings. You can research the towns. We’ll find the perfect one. I promise.”
There was a minute there when he thought she wanted to throw herself into his arms. But, as always, she turned away. Snatching up a dish towel, she began mopping her face.
“Do you think this is what Josh would want us to do?”
She always did that, produced his brother’s name as if she were lighting a candle at his altar.
And I’m pathetic to feel jealous. Worse than pathetic, he thought in disgust. Why wasn’t he glad she’d loved his brother so much?
“Yeah.” He pulled a smile from the hat. “Josh would say go for it.”
CHAPTER ONE
“EW, GROSS! MO-OM! Mattie just spit on the floor,” Liana whined.
“Tattletale,” her brother snarled. “And don’t call me Mattie again or I’ll make you sorry!”
The dull throbbing in the left side of Julia Raynor’s skull sharpened until she felt as if a drill bit was viciously driving through her forehead. She stole a glance in her rearview mirror to see her children glaring at each other.
She should have separated them by letting one ride in front, but she’d lost her temper this morning when they started fighting about whose turn it was.
“Both of you,” she’d snapped, “backseat. No argument. We’re not doing this.”
She’d wonder why Matt wanted to ride up front, given how thoroughly he seemed to detest her, except she knew. Keeping his sister from getting what she wanted seemed to be one of his few pleasures.
Julia’s only consolation was that she was pretty sure the sibling warfare was normal, no matter how aggravating it was from her point of view. So little about Matt seemed normal now, she’d take what solace she could.
The entire trip had been the closest thing to hell she could imagine. A step beyond purgatory. It should have been fun, an adventure. Not that long ago, it would have been.
Before Josh died. Before Matt became so angry.
Silence simmered behind her. It was like driving with a feral animal in a trap on the backseat right next to a fluffy, cheerful Maltese terrier now getting whiny and snappy out of fear, and Julia was beginning to wonder if the trap door was secure.
We could have flown. Been here in a few hours instead of the longest two days of my life.
Clenching the steering wheel, she wished she’d followed Alec’s example and sold the damn car and bought a new one when they arrived. She’d been worrying about how much life her eight-year-old Volkswagen Passat still had in it anyway. Clinging to the familiar was one thing; clinging to a cantankerous car that would not like cold winters was something else again.
“We’re almost there,” she said, hoping to stir some tiny remnant of excitement. Not that Matt had ever felt any. He was bitterly resentful about the move.
So what else is new? she asked herself wearily. For the past year and more, her son had bitterly resented every word she spoke, every decision she made.
“You keep saying that,” Liana said sulkily. Even Julia’s good-natured daughter was wearing down.
“Because we are getting closer. The sign we just passed said eighteen miles.”
“Oh.”
This time, a glance in the mirror assured her that they were both at least looking out their respective windows, as if some curiosity had surfaced.
The landscape was intriguing and very different from the brown hills and canyons of their most recent home. No ocean beaches here in central Oregon, either,
