Over the years, she’d done her best not to lie to her son. Not about her past or his father. For the most part, she’d simply told him there were questions she wouldn’t answer. At four or five, he’d been easily distracted. At eight, he’d been determined to find out the truth. Now he asked less, probably because he knew he couldn’t wear her down. But she knew he wondered.
“I got an e-mail today,” she announced. “You re member I told you that I have a brother?”
“Uh-huh. Roy. We don’t ever see him.”
“I know. He’s a lot older and he left when I was twelve. I woke up one morning and he was gone. I never saw him again.”
She still remembered her mother’s sobs, made thicker and louder by the alcohol lingering in her system. From that moment on, her mother spent her life waiting for Roy to return. Nothing else had mattered, certainly not Liz.
Liz had left town shortly after graduating high school. She’d phoned home once, a few weeks later, saying she thought she should check in and tell her mother where she was.
“Don’t bother calling again,” had been the woman’s only response before hanging up the phone.
“So Uncle Roy e-mailed you?”
“Not exactly.” Liz didn’t know how much to reveal. Telling the truth was one thing, but sharing details was another. “He’s, um, in some trouble and I have to help. He has two girls. Your cousins. Melissa is fourteen and Abby is your age.”
“I have cousins? You didn’t tell me about cousins.”
“I didn’t know about them until today.”
“But they’re family.”
True enough, she thought. And the word family implied caring and connection. Maybe in most places, but not in the Sutton household. At least not until Liz had had Tyler. She’d done everything she could think of to break the cycle of neglect. She’d been determined to be a warm, loving mother, to offer her child a safe haven.
“I didn’t know where Roy was,” she said. “He never got in touch with me after he left.” For six years, she’d waited, hoping he would come get her and take her away. Until he’d walked out, he’d always taken care of her. Been a buffer between her and her mother. Protected her from the worst of it.
By the time she’d been old enough to go looking, she told herself she no longer cared.
“Do they know we’re coming?” Tyler asked. “Do they know about me?”
“Not yet, but they will. We’re going to stay with them for a couple of weeks.” She didn’t mention the fact that Roy was in prison. Time enough for that later. Nor did she discuss the possibility of the girls living with them permanently. Maybe other family could take care of them.
“I grew up in a small town called Fool’s Gold,” she said. “It’s in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains.”
“Do they get snow?” he asked eagerly. Because at age eleven, seeing snow was about the best it could be.
She laughed. “Probably not in June, but yes, they get snow. There’s lots to do there. Hiking, swimming. There’s a river and a lake.”
“We could go camping.”
She made a noncommittal noise in her throat, mostly because the thought of camping ranked right up there with being awake during open-heart surgery. Not even thinking about it was pleasant. But then she wasn’t an eleven-year-old boy. She hadn’t been fascinated by worms and dirt and play cars and plastic guns, either.
More traits she knew he got from his father. Which was another problem. Not the traits, the man himself. Odds were Ethan was still in Fool’s Gold. The one place he’d asked her not to be. He’d made it clear he didn’t want her or his kid around.
Well, he was just going to have to get over it, she told herself. This was an emergency. She wouldn’t make a big deal about Tyler being in town and she certainly wouldn’t tell her son about his father. Not when Ethan had rejected them both so completely.
She would deal with the girls and get out as quickly as possible. If she happened to run into Ethan, she would be pleasant and distant. Nothing more. Because after all this time and all the ways he’d managed to hurt her, there was no way she would ever be vulnerable to him again. She’d learned her lesson. Fool me once and all that.
She gripped the steering wheel tighter and glanced at her nav system screen. It showed the way to her destination and she was counting on the little device to guide her back home when she was done.
ETHAN HENDRIX STOOD BY THE barricades between the crowd and the cyclists. The sun was hot, the spectators loud. The noise of a race was specific and not something he would ever forget. There’d been a time when he’d planned on seeing the world on the racing circuit. A long time ago, he thought, remembering the feel of the wind, the sensation of muscles burning as he dug for the will to win.