“Randy.”

  She nodded.

  John didn’t say any more. Just sat there, his beer on the counter beside his hand, watching her. And then, after long moments while Caroline waited for some verdict, he picked up the can and took a long sip.

  CHAPTER SIX

  “I HAVE TO BE HONEST with you….”

  “Okay.” Sitting at the breakfast bar in John’s kitchen, her glass of water still barely touched, Caroline braced herself. His silence had given her time to prepare. She needed to know where she stood even if that meant knowing she’d lost his respect.

  “That thing with Billy tonight—”

  She nodded, waiting to see how it tied in with what she’d confessed about her past.

  “It…I’m having problems with the whole baby thing.”

  “Our baby.” A spiral of butterflies attacked her lower belly at the intimate sound of those words. Even after she’d promised herself there’d be no intimacy.

  “Yeah.” His voice, the look in her eyes, conveyed regret for what he was about to say. Do.

  Drawing a slow breath, Caroline told herself she’d be okay. He was having second thoughts about support, but she hadn’t planned on his support to begin with. Financially or otherwise. His words weren’t going to matter.

  Which was just as well, since he didn’t give her any. He was leaving her to fill in the blanks.

  “Okay,” she said. And wondered how best to make her departure.

  “When Billy went missing, I saw the terror on his parents’ faces. I don’t think I can go through that.”

  Her thoughts skidding to a halt, Caroline sat still.

  “It told me something about myself. Something I’m not proud of, but it’s true. I didn’t break off my engagement with Lauren just because I still care about Meredith, which is what I thought. I broke it off because I somehow knew I can’t go through that again—can’t go through what I did when I lost her. Today I realized how easily it can happen. And I know that if I care that deeply again, I’m always going to be afraid of what’s around the next corner. I can’t live every day with that fear.”

  He finished his beer. Crushed the can in his hand—something she’d already come to associate with his attempts to suppress intense emotion.

  He was staring at the crushed can but didn’t seem focused on the misshapen piece of aluminum. “It dawned on me tonight that with this baby—a life I contributed to but knew absolutely nothing about—I’m powerless to prevent tragedy from happening. If that had been our son tonight…”

  His eyes met hers, and Caroline’s carefully guarded heart opened the tiniest crack.

  “You know,” she began, understanding completely, but not sure what she should say, what she could say. “One thing I’ve learned in my life is that when things happen, you handle them. Because you have no other choice.”

  His eyes were intent, as though trying to absorb something from her. Gain something.

  “If I’d contemplated being unmarried and pregnant at sixteen, or unmarried and pregnant again at thirty-five… If I’d contemplated losing Randy…” Her voice trailed off. Sharing her innermost thoughts and feelings wasn’t something Caroline did easily.

  “I would never have believed myself capable of handling any of those things,” she finally said. “I’m still not sure how I did. I only know that, at the time, there was no choice but to get up every day, so I did. I got dressed. Made whatever decisions the day required of me and then I went to bed.”

  John nodded, the glint in his eyes one of comprehension. Or so it seemed to her.

  “Just as long as you understand that I’m going to be struggling with it.”

  She nodded, smiled and before she could change her mind, reached out and squeezed his hand. Life was hard. There were few easy answers. Or even indisputably right answers. She and John had been thrown together under extreme circumstances that promised to be rife with pitfalls and challenges. Pain was inevitable.

  But he hadn’t turned his back on her and walked away. He apparently hadn’t decided, as she had, that finding herself in the single and pregnant mode a second time was inexcusable, and that it served her right to go it alone. Caroline didn’t even want to acknowledge how relieved she was about that.

  And therein lay the biggest danger of all. The danger of relying on someone else.

  She was strong. She could handle whatever came her way. Unless she gave that power away.

  “SO TELL ME about your son.” After the night of Billy’s disappearance, John had not expected to speak to Caroline Prater again until Monday afternoon’s telephone conference call with her doctor, figuring that the baby didn’t need him until then. He’d intended to work, to read, to play a round of golf and have a couple of beers with Will Parsons and some of the other guys. Until he remembered that pregnant women needed exercise.

  At least, he was fairly certain they did. It only made sense. So instead of playing golf on Saturday, he was in Phoenix with Caroline, walking through the Desert Botanical Garden. He figured, with her penchant for the out-of-doors, she’d like the place. He’d have preferred something with more buildings himself.

  Although she’d refused to come until he’d told her he was only thinking of the pregnancy, she strolled along beside him, occasionally reading excerpts from the signs along the trail, saying not one word about her son. She didn’t seem to mind being there, though.

  “It’s not personal,” he finally heard himself saying. “He’s going to be a half brother to my child, so I figure I should know something about him.” Lame, Strickland. Really lame.

  “What do you want to know?”

  About the fear she must have felt when she discovered she was pregnant at sixteen. How she’d managed school and baby feedings. If she’d been able to go to her senior prom.

  He and Meredith had gone to senior prom together. It had been their first date. And the night of their first kiss. He’d tried for more, gotten his hands slapped and fallen in love.

  “What’s he like? Other than smart?” Does he have his mother’s thirst for knowledge? Her compassion and open mind?

  She sighed, took a path that led to some pavilion—John missed the name of it. “He’s tall like his father, a typical farm boy with big shoulders and strong arms.”

  “Already at seventeen?”

  “He’s been working the farm after school, on weekends, holidays and summers since he was eight.”

  John was intrigued. It wasn’t a life he knew anything about, except perhaps from a couple of old television episodes or movies he might have seen. “Doing what?”

  “Anything from milking the cow, cleaning the barn, collecting eggs, helping in the fields—depended on what time of year it was.”

  “Did you have beef cattle?”

  “A few. We raised primarily crops. Randy worked the land from early boyhood, as well, and he was good at it. He just never made enough to invest in the property or the equipment. Every time there was a little extra money, the tractor would break or the barn roof would spring a leak.”

  There was no bitterness in her voice. No complaint. Not even any regret that he could detect.

  “Did Jesse like the work?” Did she?

  Caroline shrugged, glancing back and forth across the trail as different flowering plants came into view. “It was life,” she said. “It wasn’t a matter of liking it. He just did it.” Her expression was placid, telling him nothing, yet John sensed there was much more to know.

  “So where does Harvard come in? Does he plan to return to the farm after he graduates?”

  She looked over at him assessingly, as though trying to determine if his question crossed the personal boundaries they’d set for themselves. John wished he had her talent for facial camouflage. More, he wished he knew for sure that there was nothing to camouflage. He’d been thinking about her a lot. But only, he told himself, because she was carrying his child.

  “No, he doesn’t plan to return.”

  They circled the pavilion—a butterfly haven at certain times of the year—and headed down another paved trail through more cacti and bushes and flowering plants.

  “How did Randy feel about that?”

  Her glance at him was sharp.

  “You learn a lot about a teenager by how he relates to his parents,” he said, answering her unspoken question. Not that he knew anything about teenagers except what he’d learned from being one.

  “Randy refused to discuss college with Jess. He just kept talking like Jesse was going to be working the farm full-time after his high school graduation.”

  That must’ve been difficult. For all of them. “But Jesse persevered.”

  “Yes.”

  “Mature kid you’ve got there.”

  She smiled, slid a rock off the path with the tip of her boot. “Sometimes. Especially since his father died and he’s become the self-appointed man of the house. And then other times he’ll say something that reminds me of the little boy I used to have to coax to eat his oatmeal.”

  “Does he know about the baby?” Not that he’d blame her if she hadn’t told Jesse. An unexpected pregnancy like this couldn’t be an easy thing to explain to a teenager—especially with his own father so recently dead.

  “No.” Caroline’s pace picked up. “He found it hard enough to cope with my move. It’s best to break things to him one at a time. It’s always been that way with Jesse. Even as a kid. Like the summer I had to tell him that not only wasn’t there enough money to go to Nashville on vacation, but there wasn’t going to be any vacation at all and he’d have to work more hours on the farm until school started. I told him about Nashville and then waited a week before I broke the rest of it.”

  “How’d he take it?”

  “He was angry, stormed out of the house cursing about the unfairness of life. An hour later he was back apologizing and asking for a hug. Both times.”

  Something tugged at John’s stomach as he pictured the woman beside him mothering her son. Something that made their whole situation more complicated.

  And he had enough complications.

  “You ready to go back?” he asked. They’d only been there half an hour. Hardly worth the eighteen dollars he’d paid for their admission.

  “Sure.”

  No questions asked. Sometimes the woman was so accommodating it annoyed him.

  CAROLINE WOKE UP her second Sunday in Shelter Valley and spent half an hour staring at the ceiling, engaged in a mental debate. She’d been going to church every Sunday her entire life. She didn’t feel complete just lying in bed without that weekly tune-up. But more than spiritual renewal, church in Grainville had been the social event of the week. Of course, there’d been only one church there—a nondenominational gathering of people struggling to get by in a hard world.

  Shelter Valley had three churches, but she knew which one she’d want to attend. David Marks’s church. Not only was it nondenominational, it was walking distance from her room. Caroline couldn’t bear the thought of pulling up to church in her rusted-out old truck—with people watching her get out. She was going to find it awkward in a big college parking lot, and a church parking lot was so much smaller. Worse, everyone arrived—and left—at the same time. Her presence would definitely be noticed.

  Something she’d learned about Arizona—rusted vehicles weren’t all that common. Must be because the dry warmth preserved metal here. But whatever the case, it made her truck doubly embarrassing.

  Still, one voice in her head argued, she was lucky to have that old truck. Thankful to have it. And she was who she was. A dirt-poor, mostly uneducated Kentucky farm woman who, at not quite thirty-five, had already raised a family. She was also a woman who’d loved to chat with her neighbors and help out whenever she could. A woman who’d looked forward to Sundays, and catching up, all week long.

  A woman who wanted to go to church.

  But in a town this size, a new parishioner, especially one whose only winter church dress was a hand-sewn brown gingham made from her mother’s old living-room curtains, would certainly draw attention. She’d taken on a lot in the past couple of weeks, was still trying to figure out the implications for herself, had no faith that she could come up with the answers she needed. And she felt relatively safe with her anonymity in this town.

  She turned over, pulling up the quilt her mother had made her and Randy for Christmas ten years before. Was she ready to risk that sense of safety just to go to church? she asked herself. She hadn’t had a full night’s sleep since Randy died. Wouldn’t it be better to try to doze off?

  Was she going to let fear keep her trapped in bed? her other voice demanded. Why was she there if not to live?

  What if John Strickland went to David Marks’s church? She’d die if he saw her in her old dress and lace-up brown shoes—ones that looked no better than her boots but could manage the snow on cold Kentucky winter days.

  Throwing off the covers, Caroline got up, barely noticing the chilly wood floor beneath her bare feet as her flannel gown slid down to her ankles. John Strickland’s opinion of her looks mattered not at all and if she was going to start thinking it did, she’d just have to prove to herself that she was wrong. She’d put on her dress and go to church.

  And if Phyllis Langford Sheffield attended David Marks’s church? Caroline’s stomach churned. The thought of seeing Phyllis had been the force compelling her through the worst months of her life. But thoughts and reality were sometimes so different.

  Seeing her twin sister was the thing she wanted above all else—except for Jesse’s safety and health, of course, and the health of her unborn child. And what if Phyllis turned up her nose at the country bumpkin? Or worse, Caroline made some social faux pas that would haunt her nights with humiliating memories? Wasn’t a dream better left a dream if that way it could remain intact?

  She looked back at the bed, grabbed the sheet and quilt in one hand, and contemplated diving under the worn cotton and getting a real day of rest. Something she could easily have done in Grainville and saved herself a whole lot of bother and money.

  With more force than necessary, Caroline jerked the covers up, yanking them tightly enough to remove the wrinkles, and settled the embroidered pillowcases on top. She was going to David Marks’s church. She’d go late.

  She’d sit in the back.

  And leave early.

  And if that was living, her other voice said, then she’d hate to see what dying was.

  “MA-MA UP! Ma-ma up!”

  “Yeah! Ma-ma up!”

  “Uhh…” It was the last Sunday morning before school started, and Phyllis Langford Sheffield groaned, bracing herself to ride out the effects of a couple of two-year-olds clambering onto her bed. She was pretty sure her stomach was divorcing her. Not only that, her tongue was sticking to the roof of her mouth. And her head weighed a ton.

  She cracked open one eye to stare into two pairs of dark eyes only inches from her face. “Where’s Daddy?”

  “Da-da!” Calvin repeated happily and with a notable measure of pride at his accomplishment.

  “Da-da!” Clarissa, more often the leader of the two, parroted.

  The twins—she wasn’t sure which one was first—climbed on her curled-up body and started to bounce up and down.

  “Ma-ma up!”

  “Ma-ma up!”

  She should roll over, find the energy to lift them off her. The peace that would follow would be glorious to her heaving stomach.

  “Giddyup, Ma-ma!” Clarissa’s sweet voice would have brought a smile to her face if her cheeks hadn’t hurt so much.

  “Where’s Daddy?” She was wasting her last vestiges of strength. There was no way they were going to hear her above their whoops and giggles. It was also pretty clear—to her at least—that they had no idea where their father had run off to.

  To be fair, he hadn’t known she was sick. As production manager of Montford’s theater, Matt had worked late the night before, overseeing a private rental, a well-known jazz musician who’d come to Shelter Valley to perform for a sellout and very appreciative crowd.

  “Daddy’s right here,” the voice of her dreams said from somewhere near their bathroom door.

  “Oh, thank God,” Phyllis mumbled into her pillow.

  “What are you two rascals doing to your mother?” he asked.

  “Giddyap!” Calvin shouted in his baby voice.

  “Did you ask Mommy if she wanted to be a horse this morning?” Matt’s voice was closer, as though he was propping himself on an elbow beside her.

  “Horsey!” Both kids cried with glee. “Horsey!” Their bouncing gained intensity with each brain-piercing shriek.

  “Dead.” Phyllis gave everything she had to that one word.

  “Mommy, did you tell these two adorable little devils that you wanted to be a horsey this morning?” Matt asked playfully, pushing her hair back from her face. She opened an eye again, just to see the gorgeous smile she knew would be lighting her husband’s face.

  “Dead,” she muttered.

  Her eye dropped shut just as Matt’s expression fell. “Hon, what’s wrong?” Sweeter than his words was the immediate removal of the jumping weights on her body and bed. With another quick peek, she caught a glimpse of her husband with a squirming two-year-old under each arm.

  “Flu,” she said, her mouth getting tangled in her pillowcase. “Or death.”

  His frown didn’t suggest any appreciation of her sense of humor. Just as well, since she wasn’t sure it was going to last. She needed to throw up, pass out or weep.

  “Let me get these two in high chairs with dry cereal and a video, and I’ll be right back.”

  They generally didn’t let the television babysit their children. But sometimes… “Blue’s Clues,” Phyllis mumbled. They’d get as much as thirty minutes out of that one.

  Matt sat down on the bed, too close to her for comfort. Phyllis groaned. “Blue’s Clues.” Please, God, let him hear her this time. She didn’t think…

  “They’ve seen it twice. And Lion King, too.”

  Both eyes flew open. “What?”