understood her distress.
Across her belly, vertical lines, so faint they were all but invisible.
The lines a woman’s abdomen acquires as her body stretches to accommodate a pregnancy.
His gaze met hers. Tears streamed down her face.
She was somebody’s mother.
Chapter Two
Grace managed to gather enough wits to wash her hair and towel dry herself. The man didn’t leave the room, though she could feel his intense desire to do so. If he stayed, it must be because she looked as awful as she felt.
A pregnancy. She had a child.
She wiped the tears from her face with shaky fingers.
A baby.
Or not. Maybe the pregnancy hadn’t ended well. Maybe that was the tragedy that had propelled her into a lifestyle that ultimately led her to find herself in a stranger’s bathroom, needle marks on her arm, covered with bruises, her mind little more than a foggy cliff edged with perilous drops into nothingness.
The man handed her a tissue which she took gratefully and blew her nose.
Competing for attention with an exhaustion so acute it ate away at her joints was a growing sense of anxiety. There was someplace she needed to be, someone she needed to see, something she needed to do.
But what?
“Here, put this on,” the man said.
She stared at the blue garment and realized she’d been standing there with the towel clutched to her chest, the rest of her body stark naked. She knew what he offered was a robe, she knew he wanted her to put it on, to cover herself. She even knew, in some remote part of her mind, that he felt disconcerted by her nudity. She reached for the robe, but everything seemed to happen in slow motion. At last, she got it around her. She could feel the man’s relief.
What kind of woman is so unconcerned about a strange man seeing her naked?
She didn’t even want to contemplate the possibilities. She was too tired to ponder such a troubling question.
“Thank you,” she mumbled.
He shrugged broad shoulders still encased in a gray suit jacket now stained with shower water. As she watched, he took off his jacket and draped it over a towel bar, then rolled up the sleeves of a white shirt. He had nice forearms, strong looking, dusted with fine, dark hair.
But what she’d noticed first about him still dominated his looks and those were his eyes. They were green or maybe blue, it was hard to tell, and framed with dark lashes and brows. All sorts of things seemed to swirl in them: compassion, challenge, distaste, self-awareness, humor, trouble, danger. She’d seen all those things and while some had dismayed her, others had warmed her and given her courage.
She stared at the rest of him as he dug in a wall cabinet. He was tall and powerfully built. When he’d carried her up the outside stairs, she’d felt like a feather floating on the wind, like no burden at all. He had a habit of rubbing the back of his head, ruffling the short brown hair, stretching as though there was so much going on inside his head that it put a strain on his neck.
She suspected that she herself was the cause of his current tension.
He produced a box of Band-Aids and a tube of ointment. “Sit down on the edge of the tub,” he told her, and she did as he said. Was she always this wishy-washy, this easy to control?
No. She knew she wasn’t.
Kneeling in front of her, he treated and bandaged her knee. She made herself rally to ask him a few questions. First, his name.
“Travis MacBeth,” he said, gazing up at her. “People call me Mac.”
The nun at the shelter had called him Mac. Now she remembered. The next question was harder. “Who is Jake?”
“An acquaintance.” When she stared, he added, “A homeless boozer.”
“And my clothes…they’re his?”
“I assume so. Seems kind of unlikely there are two identical coats running around the back streets of Billington. Plus, this is the first night in two months that Jake wasn’t waiting for me at the mouth of that alley and the first night you were.” He paused for a second and added, “Grace? Why did you run out of that alley the way you did?”
She wasn’t sure what he was talking about.
“Were you running from something or someone?” he persisted.
She was running. Toward the light? Away from the light. Away from Jake?
Maybe her face reflected the unease the hazy memory of that alley engendered because Mac patted her arm and said, “Don’t worry about it.”
“Do you think…do you suppose…I hurt Jake? To get his coat, I mean. Was that why I was running?”
He stared at her and then smiled. Was it the first time he’d done that or had he smiled before and she’d forgotten? At any rate, he had a good smile, the kind a person could find themselves working to see again. The kind that took years and cares off a man’s face and gave a glimpse of what lay hidden in his heart. He said, “No. I don’t think so. We looked for Jake, remember?”
They’d walked through the alley. She could recall the clanging of empty bottles and the look of disgust in Mac’s eyes as he asked if they were hers. “How old do you think I am?” she asked.
Again he stared at her. “Early twenties, maybe.”
“And I’ve had a baby.”
“You’ve apparently had a pregnancy. And a husband.”
That jolted her. “A husband?”
He touched the ring finger on her left hand. “There’s a tan line here. There are tan lines on your body, as well.”
Sure enough, there was a discernible white line on her finger. She stared at it until her eyes burned. It didn’t help. No memory of a loving husband surfaced. No memory of an awful husband surfaced, either. She felt a new spurt of anxiety and wondered if it was related to the husband whose ring she’d apparently forsaken.
Or hocked. Or lost.
Or to a baby she held in her arms, nursed at her breast, and now couldn’t remember.
It was all too much.
“Which brings to mind all sorts of questions,” Mac said.
She gazed at him and waited, but when he finally spoke, she found she couldn’t comprehend what he said. She just couldn’t. His words stretched out and away and began to seem like musical notes in some bizarre song.
Could she sing along?
What were the words?
She felt his hands on her shoulders
