LITMIR.BIZ

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chosen Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day—she liked any book title with a resemblance to her mother’s name in it. Nick shot Tara a what’s-with-this-book look, since the child seemed so happy. He’d soon learn, Tara thought, that Claire had lots of problems that came out in lots of ways. As Nick read the familiar book to his niece, Tara’s mind drifted. She could have written Tara’s Horrendous, Impossible, Ridiculous, Gut-wrenching Day. She felt both emotionally exhausted and keyed up; for once, the glass of red wine she and Nick had drunk with dinner was not making her sleepy. She was as revved up as if she’d downed a whole pot of coffee and she was dying to get online to search comatose woman + childbirth and to phone Jen. But she needed to talk to Nick in private first.

      After they tucked Claire in bed, they sat out on the deck overlooking the darkening mountains. For the first time in the thirteen months since she’d moved in with Claire, Tara felt like a guest. It was an amazingly peaceful scene and yet she felt so uptight.

      “You’re probably very tired,” she said, feeling she should give him a way out of further conversation if he wanted to be alone—with man’s best friend, that is. Beamer trailed him everywhere and now lay two feet from the rungs of Nick’s rocker.

      “I’m kind of jazzed, tell you the truth.”

      They shared small talk, things about Claire’s daily schedule. He with another beer, she with herbal tea, they rocked and watched the setting sun stain the western sky bloodred. To the northeast, down the mountain and over the darkening silhouettes of spiky pines and leaf-rattling aspens, they could see the distant lights of Denver coming on in twinkling pinpoints. Behind them, up the mountain, the thick, black tree line loomed.

      “Lots of memories here,” he said softly, then cleared his throat. “I guess it’s pretty tough to have lost some memories, when you were…hurt.”

      “Besides losing Alex, I lost my husband. That was just as well though. No woman wants someone who isn’t in for the hard times as well as the good. We had a lot of differences.” She switched to a news-reporter-style voice: “Independent, self-supporting, middle-class woman weds big money and becomes property of the lord of the manor, along with the loyal-only-unto-themselves Lohan family.” She dropped the elevated tone and went on. “Laird Lohan gave me a shock when he left me—and left town—but also saved me some heartache. I’m slowly getting my real self back, becoming just working girl Tara Kinsale again. And Claire’s been such a big part of my life and recovery.”

      “Alex had a tough marriage, too. Things were bad with Clay, obviously, even before he took Claire from her.” He shook his head. “I guess I was in my own little freewheeling-bachelor and dog-training world during most of that. Thank God, the cops found Clay, and he’s locked up for life.”

      “Yes, but you should know that his family, especially his younger brother Rick, really took Clay’s conviction personally, as if it was Alex’s, or even my fault. She wasn’t around to blame, so Rick berated me. Told me off in person and later sent me a threatening letter, which I saved.”

      He frowned and shifted in his chair so hard it creaked. “Yeah, that sounds like Rick. Not the sharpest knife in the drawer, but he’s more of a blowhard than someone with the guts to do something. He doesn’t have a family and never quite made a go of things professionally—keeps changing jobs, even careers. He hasn’t bothered you since his initial eruption, has he?”

      “Haven’t seen hide nor hair of him.”

      “Beamer would growl if he came around here.”

      “You’ll have to have a chat with Beamer,” she said, glad to change the subject. “He doesn’t growl, but he barks anytime a fox or elk or bear is around.”

      “He just needs a bit of reeducation on manners. So…” He drew the word out as if he hesitated to embark on whatever he was going to say. “I take it that happy, smiling Claire still has her dark moments—that book she chose tonight, stuff like that.”

      “Yes. I think hearing about another kid’s difficult day comforts her. It teaches her she’s not the only one with problems and losses, although few suffer what she’d been through. The two of us are open about her losses, and she knows about mine—”

      Her voice caught. But did she have a loss Claire didn’t know about—one that she herself didn’t know about? No, she could not have had a child of her own, a baby who would now be—let’s see, probably around two and a half years old. If, by the wildest stretch of imagination, that were true, where was the proof? Where was the child?

      “Go on,” Nick prompted, making her realize she’d stopped in the middle of a sentence. It took her a moment to get back on her mental track.

      “Claire and I have leaned on each other,” she said. “But don’t be startled if you hear her shrieking in the middle of the night.”

      “Bad dreams?”

      She nodded. “Very.” She didn’t tell him that ever since her recovery from the coma—or perhaps even during the coma—she also had been stalked by the monsters of warped, horrendous nightmares. She’d received counseling for the dreams at the Lohan Clinic when she was trying to make plans and put her life back together.

      “Nick,” she said, speaking faster now as she turned in her rocker to face him, “if you don’t mind my asking, what are your plans?”

      “Undecided. I’ve got a too-good-to-turn-down offer to train dogs for the armed forces, but it would mean a move to North Carolina. With all my experience, I feel it’s my duty, in peace or wartime. These dogs would not be bomb sniffers but trackers who hunt the enemy—specific people, when we can give the dogs a scent, like what I’ve been doing these last two years. But Claire’s my duty now, too.”

      “Your mother told me once that when you got the funding, you wanted to open a dog academy around here, to train dogs and their humans to search for lost people.”

      “True. I love this area. In a way, we’re both in the finders business, aren’t we? Tara, I can’t thank you enough for all you’ve done for Claire. I know you didn’t do it for me, but speaking for my entire family, gone though they are…” His voice trailed off again. He cleared his throat. “Anything I can do to help you—to repay—I don’t mean with money. Guess you’ve been there, done that.”

      “I appreciate your support,” she told him. Damn, she was resting her free hand on her belly again, almost as if she had a stomachache. Here she was discussing what was most important to her and Claire and she kept coming back to the fact she could not have had a baby. No! No way in all creation was that remotely possible!

      “You’re upset,” he said, leaning toward her with his elbow on the arm of his chair, so they mirrored each other’s body language. They had both stopped rocking; earlier she’d noticed how they had rocked in unison. “Even if Claire and I move across the country,” he told her, “you’re always welcome to visit, and we’ll come see you. I doubt if the move would be permanent. Maybe just a few years. I don’t mean to hurt you after all you’ve been through.”

      “Don’t worry about that,” she said, rising to go inside before she blurted out everything to him about today, not to mention the fact that she would just hate it—hate him—if he took Claire away. “Sometimes there’s nowhere to go but up. I know whereof I speak.”

      “But all that’s behind you now,” he said as she started inside.

      She turned back to face him. Wouldn’t he be shocked if she dumped her doctor’s claim about a belly line and cervical dimples on a man she barely knew on his first day home? The darn doctor was right about the subtle changes to her breasts and belly, but surely all that could have resulted from her coma, too. At least, that’s what she told herself before today.

      “By the way,” she said, “I get Claire up for school at seven, but we’ll be quiet if you want to sleep in. It will be nice to have a man on the premises, since it feels a bit isolated up here, even with Beamer on patrol. I’ll start looking for a new place

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