“I should’ve called Grandpa from Missoula when I got there. He’d’ve come to get me. He wouldn’t be mad.”
“You were coming home from Missoula?”
“From … otherwhere. I don’t know. I’m awfully tired now.”
“I’ll get the nurse for you. You can rest awhile.”
“They roast turkey for Thanksgiving, but I like Grammy’s ham better. Grammy makes ham for Thanksgiving, and we all make pies. I’m going to sleep.”
“All right, Alice. Here, I’ll help you.” He helped her to the bed, tucked a throw around her.
“It’s soft. Everything is soft here. Is the mother here?”
“I’ll go get her for you. You rest.”
He went out, signaled to the nurse before he started down for Cora.
An outbuilding, a dog, somewhere on the road from Missoula to the ranch, sometime around Thanksgiving—though God knew how long ago.
It was more than he’d had.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Time moved. While most of home life centered around Alice—what to say, what not to say, what to do, what not to do—spring glided in with all its sweetness and all its demands. The sun came earlier, stayed later, and those daylight hours increased the work.
Bodine often thought of that work as an escape from the stress and worry of the eggshell-walking required at home. Then felt guilty for thinking it.
She thought of the nights she spent with Callen in his narrow bed or at an empty cabin as another kind of escape. And didn’t feel the slightest twinge of guilt. If she analyzed it, as she sometimes did, she concluded he gave her balance, companionship, a good ear for listening, a steadier hand than she’d ever given him credit for.
And really good sex.
She liked to think she gave him just the same.
Most days she saddled up and rode to work with him, then home again. If she could juggle the time, she rode home again midday to give her grannies a little break from Alice.
“I like her.” Though she had an agenda in mind, Bodine rode easily beside Callen. “Every once in a while something—someone—peeks out from the trauma. And I know I’d like that someone. And the dogs like her, which is a good gauge.”
“The dogs like Alice?”
“And it’s mutual. A lot of the time they sprawl and snore at her feet when she crochets. The sheriff came by while I was there this afternoon. He’s got a good way with her, too.”
“Did he get anything more?”
“It came out she was twenty-one—just turned twenty-one when she started hitchhiking home. So that gives him a closer when. I don’t know what he can do to close up twenty-six years and find something, but I could see it mattered knowing. She wanted me to stay while he talked to her. She was happy starting out, like we were all having a little visit. She’s making another scarf—for me. She finished Rory’s.”
Lifting her face to the sky, Bodine shook her head. “I’m all over the place.”
“Not so much. She likes you, trusts you. She likes Tate. She’s shy with me if I’m around, but I don’t scare her.”
“It’s the same with Dad and Chase—the shy but not scared. And still she won’t step outside. People are outside, and that’s that.”
“She needs more time.”
“I know, and it hasn’t been much time yet. But … We all have to be so careful, and it wears, Callen. It’s helping, but it wears. Some days she knows Rory’s not her son. Others she digs in there like a mama bear. It’s hard on Rory. He’s dealing better than anyone could expect. You forget to give him credit sometimes for his heart. He has such a good heart.”
“You want to know what I think?”
“I’m blabbering about it, again, so I must.”
“You’ve always been tight. God, I admired and envied that all my life. Your family pulls together, and this situation’s made you pull harder. I figure Alice is peeking out from what that fucker made her because she’s got that in her. I know what it’s like to be eighteen and pissed at the world. More than you,” he added.
“I’ve been pretty lucky in my world.”
“It’s more than luck, but yeah. I know what it’s like to want to come home, to need to. Nobody stopped me from doing that, nobody stole more than half my life. And it was hard enough to come back.”
“I never thought of that,” she said quietly. “I never thought it was hard for you coming back.” As they rode, slow and easy, she studied his profile. “I should’ve.”
“You never know what’s changed, what’s the same, and if you’ll fit back again. It’s the chance you take going and coming back. I’d say the fact she’s able to make her scarves and talk to Tate—to anyone without screaming—to get up in the morning and go to bed at night means whoever she was at eighteen, whatever that son of a bitch tried to turn her into, there’s a hell of a lot of Bodine in there. It’ll do more than peek through.”
It took her a moment before she could speak. “Do you want to know what I think?”
“I’m listening to you blabbering, so I must.”
“I think I might go a little crazy if I didn’t have you to talk to. The things we say, and God knows the things we don’t, at the ranch are always careful now. They have to be. Mom and Grammy are worried about Nana, Dad’s worried about all of them. Chase takes Rory off more than he needs to just to give him some breathing room.”
“You do the same.”
“I do, we just don’t say much about any of it. Really can’t. And I bet I’m not the only one leaning on you.”
“I’ve got good balance.”
“I was thinking just that.”
Shifting in the saddle, he gave her a long study. “So you don’t have to think you need to change directions and not keep on the way you were going. We’re already on land that might have been mine if things had been different. They weren’t different. It isn’t mine.”
“I’m sorry.” She stopped her horse, realized she shouldn’t have been surprised he caught her turning away from his old house. “It seemed like a good idea. Now it doesn’t.”
He knew the land the same way he knew his own hands. For the moment he was content enough to sit his horse and look at it. “We signed the papers, and it’s yours. Your family’s. I don’t regret it.”
“It would break my heart if we had to sell our land.”
Oddly, he thought it would break his own if that ever happened.
“It’s not like that for me, not this land. I don’t know if it ever was. One of these days I’ll want my own, and I’ll get it.” With a shrug he smiled at her. “I did all right in California. You’re not too polite to ask about that, but you haven’t.”
“There’s not too polite and there’s downright rude. I can be downright rude,” she decided. “What’s ‘all right’ for yourself, more or less?”
“Enough I didn’t have to sell. I could’ve kept the land, given my mother and sister their shares. Bought some stock, got a decent ranch going.”