How she’d yearned.

How, alone again, she’d danced in that room, imagining herself a ballerina, or a Broadway star, or what she’d become. And so good, so exceptional, her mother would watch her with the same yearning she felt.

Then the man had come, bringing fear and blood and pain.

His face—she remembered every detail of it—blurred everything else from her vision so she had to stop the timer.

“No point, no point, no point going back there.”

Closing her eyes, she breathed through it. Even the media rarely dug that horrid old story up now. Old, old news. No point.

She reminded herself she rarely had moments like this, when the fear rushed back, turned her cold, then hot, then breathless.

She’d push through it. She had pushed through it.

“I’m strong,” she told her reflection. “And I’m not defined by one horrible day in the whole of my life.”

She started to turn the timer back on, then caught a glimpse of Sadie in the mirror, sprawled a few feet back, watching her.

Yearning, Adrian thought.

Instead of turning on the timer, she walked back to sit on the floor, nuzzle the big bear of a dog who made love noises in her throat. A sound that always made Adrian laugh.

“I’ll come back to this. Let’s you and me go outside and play chase the ball.”

You made time for the ones you loved, she thought as she went outside, picked up the big orange ball that put a light of joy in Sadie’s eyes.

If her childhood had taught her anything, it was to make time for her passion, her responsibilities. And for the ones she loved.

CHAPTER TEN

Through the summer after his wife’s death, Raylan worked almost exclusively from home. And almost always at night. Sleep hadn’t been his friend since Lorilee’s death, so he turned nights into work time, and snatched some sleep in the early morning hours.

He napped when—if—the kids napped.

He couldn’t handle the idea of a nanny, couldn’t stand to bring yet another drastic change into his children’s lives. And he couldn’t bear the idea of leaving them with someone else.

And since for the first few weeks Bradley often woke up crying in the middle of the night, sleep became more luxury than priority.

He’d never forget the help, the comfort, the attention his mother and sister had provided, but they couldn’t stay forever.

He had responsibilities, first to his kids, then to his work. And the work not only provided for his family, but kept his company solvent and employees who counted on him paying their bills.

For snatches of time, he could lose himself in the work, or in the needs of his kids. The laundry, the grocery runs, the food prep, the attention, the trips to the park. The everything that added up to trying to give them a sense of security, a sense of normal.

He’d always wondered how single parents managed.

He found out a lot of the managing involved desperation and exhaustion—and a complete lack of self-anything-at-all.

He lost weight—a pound here, a pound there, until he went from lean to gaunt. He barely recognized himself whenever he caught a glimpse in the mirror.

But he didn’t have time to do anything about it.

In the fall, he went into the office after he took the kids to school, before he picked them up again.

He worked out a routine that included hiring a weekly housekeeper to handle the cleaning chores he and Lorilee had always managed to deal with.

At Christmas, when he simply wanted to close himself in the dark and grieve all over again, he forced himself to put up a tree, to string lights.

And broke down, thankfully alone, when he started to hang the stockings and unpacked Lorilee’s. The grief simply rolled through him, a dark, terrible wave that dropped him to the floor.

How could he do this? How could anyone get through this?

As he clutched the stocking, Jasper padded over to him, crawled into his lap, and laid his head on Raylan’s shoulder.

He pulled the dog in, held on and held on until the worst passed.

He would do it, and he would get through it. Because his kids slept upstairs, and they needed him.

But instead of having Christmas morning at home, then driving to his mother’s for the holiday dinner and Boxing Day, they had their little family Christmas the morning of Christmas Eve, then made the drive down.

Santa brought the presents and filled the stocking early, he told the kids, because he knew they were going to Nana’s. Because Santa knew everything.

New traditions, he told himself. He had to make them so the old ones didn’t break him into pieces he’d never put together again.

So he got through the summer, the fall and winter, and on the anniversary of Lorilee’s death, he sat alone in the dark, his kids asleep, and dreamed of her.

She slid onto his lap as she’d often done in their quiet, alone times. He smelled her, that soft floral fragrance she’d used. It filled him like breath.

“You’re doing fine, honey.”

“I don’t want to do fine. I want you.”

“I know. But I’m here. I’m in the kids. I’m in here.” She laid a hand on his heart. “You just have to keep going. I know today’s hard, but you’ll get through it to tomorrow.”

“I want to go back. I want to stop you from going to work that day.”

“Can’t.” She nuzzled at his throat. “And if I hadn’t gone, that boy would be dead. Don’t say you don’t care, because that’s not true. Who knows who he’ll grow up to be, what wonderful things he might do?”

“He came to see me,” Raylan murmured. “With his parents. I didn’t want to talk to them.”

“But you did.”

“They wanted me to know … they just wanted me to know how sorry, how grateful. I didn’t want to care.”

“But you did.”

“They got permission to plant a tree on the school grounds. A dwarf cherry—the ornamental—that you can see from your classroom window. They wanted me to know they’d never forget you.”

“We can’t know what other good and kind things he might do with his life. And if I hadn’t been there, maybe whoever took my class wouldn’t have gotten the other kids to safety. We can’t know, honey, we just can’t know.”

“We can’t know what you’d have done with yours. What we’d have done with ours.”

“Oh, Raylan, I did what I had to do with mine, and I guess what I was meant to do. You know that. Now you’re doing what you need to do. Remember how we talked the night before it happened, about how to tell the kids about Sophia?”

“We were going to tell them she had to become an angel, and she’d be looking out for them, for others who needed it.”

“It seemed the right thing because they’re so young. But you can think of me that way, too. Because I’m always with you, Raylan, honey. Looking out for you and our babies.”

“Adrian wrote me. She said you were an angel.”

“Well, there you go, right?” She kissed him, so soft, so sweet. “I love you, Raylan. And you have to let the grief go now. It’s not the same as letting me go, the memories, the love. Let the grief go now, and turn it into something else. For me, for our babies.”