Page 55 of Tracking Safety

More emotion nearly choked her, but she held herself together.

Cora reached past Jenna and clicked on the small nightlight on the bedside table. Its soft, yellow glow spread across the wall.

“I need that on,” Cora said, her expression dead serious.

“I know.” Jenna tucked the blanket around her. “I remember.”

Surprise flashed through Cora’s gaze, but she didn’t say anything. She just looked at Jenna with those dark eyes before smiling.

Then Jenna turned to Liam, her heart aching at the distance he kept from her. She understood it—but the reaction still hurt. However, she knew this was all her own doing. The blame rested on her shoulders.

He lay on his back and stared at the ceiling, deliberately not looking at her. This was the hardest on him, Jenna realized. He was old enough to remember the pain of her abandonment.

She sat on the edge of his bed. “Hey.”

He quickly looked at her before shifting his gaze back at the ceiling. “Hey.”

She didn’t push. Instead, she sat with him in the soft glow of the nightlight and let the quiet be what it was.

After a moment, he shifted. The motion was barely perceptible, just a fraction of movement toward her rather than away.

She leaned down and kissed his forehead the way she used to when he was small, half expecting him to pull away.

He didn’t.

“Good night, Liam,” she murmured.

“Night.” He still looked at the ceiling, but his voice had lost its careful flatness.

She stood and looked at all three of her children. They were all breathing and warm and real, their faces soft in the nightlight’s glow. Luke had done a wonderful job holding the family together while she’d been gone. She hadn’t doubted he would.

Her gaze drifted to the window across the room. It had gone black, the nightlight nowhere near reaching it, and it pulled at her the way dark glass always did.

She didn’t walk toward it. A lit room behind black glass meant anyone out in the yard could see her plainly while she saw nothing at all—she’d learned that the hard way. She was always the one in the light.

Out there was the yard, the woods, and anyone could be hiding there and looking in.

Nothing was out there, she told herself. Almost certainly nothing was out there.

Just like the smell earlier—the one that reminded her of Roderick’s cologne. That had just been her imagination and nothing more.

The cold along her arms didn’t believe it.

Right now, she didn’t trust herself to say anything else.

Instead, she crossed to the door, feeling like this was the most wonderful and awful day of her life.

As Luke watched Jenna cross the room toward him, something shifted in his chest—something he hadn’t been prepared for.

He’d been standing in the doorway for the better part of twenty minutes. He’d told himself he was there to supervise—to make sure the kids were okay.

That was partly true.

The rest of it was that he hadn’t been able to make himself leave.

He’d watched Jenna sit on the edge of Jonah’s bed and negotiate blankets with her same unmistakable patience. He’d watched her hold Cora—Cora, who hadn’t let go of her mother since the moment she’d seen Jenna.

He’d watched Jenna sit beside Liam.