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Liam picked up the phone. “Hello, Rosa. ”
“Dr. Liam. This is you? I am sorry not to call earlier, but I was working the dinner shift this ni—”
“Mike’s had an accident,” he said quickly, while he still had the nerve to form the words. Then, taking a deep breath, he told his mother-in-law everything.
A pause slid through the lines. “I will be there tomorrow. ”
“Thank you,” he said, not realizing until that moment how very much he needed her help in this. “I’ll arrange for a plane ticket. ”
“No. It will be quicker if I drive. I will leave first thing in the morning. Will she …”
Make it through the night.
“We hope so,” he answered the unfinished question. “The morning should be … fine. Thanks, Rosa. ”
“Dr. Liam?” Another pause, then a soft “Pray for her. More than medicines and machines, she will need God now. You pray for her. ”
“Every minute, Rosa. Every minute. ”
When he hung up the phone, he went to his bedroom. It took all his strength to merely cross the threshold. When he’d come in here earlier, he’d had Bret with him, and the child in his arms had acted as a talisman. Now, Liam felt acutely vulnerable and alone. This was where Mikaela belonged; in this room, theirs, the one she’d once painted fire-engine red just for fun; the one that now had gold moons and stars and suns stenciled on its smooth eggshell-white walls and a chiffon-draped canopy bed that she said made her feel like Candice Bergen in The Wind and the Lion. Unfortunately, it made him feel like Candice Bergen, too, but so what? She loved their room, and so he’d crawled into their bed every night and thanked God that she wanted him there. Him, an ordinary man whose only claim to the extraordinary was the depth of his love for a woman.
Rosa Elena Luna walked toward the small altar in her living room and carefully lit two votive candles. Thin spots of light glowed reassuringly within the pebbled red glass.
She sank to her knees on the cracked linoleum floor and clasped her hands, staring at the figurine of the Virgin Mary as she began to pray. First, the Lord’s Prayer.
But the familiar words didn’t ease this ache spreading through her chest. Tears blurred her eyes but didn’t fall. She’d learned long ago that tears were just bits of water that had no power to heal.
She grabbed the rickety table leg and pulled herself to a stand. After a long night at the diner, her knees made a sound like popping corn.
For the first time in many years, she wanted to call William Brownlow. She glanced longingly at the phone on the wall.
He would be no help, of course. She hadn’t seen him in several years. Sunville was a small town, but even in so small a place, they traveled in different circles. He owned a modest apple orchard—not a powerful, wealthy man by anyone’s standards, but compared to Rosa, he might as well have been a Kennedy. Though he had fathered Mikaela, he had never been a father to her. He had another family, a lily-white one. He had spent fifteen years in Rosa’s bed, but every moment had been stolen from his wife and legitimate children.
He would not come to the rescue of his bastard daughter.
Rosa stood in the darkened living room. Here and there, watery moonlight peeked through the worn, tattered curtains, illuminating the garage-sale sofa, the wood-grained plastic end tables, the religious paintings on the walls. Mikaela and Liam had often tried to get Rosa to move from this house, or to accept money to repair it, but she always refused them. She was afraid that if she left, she would forget the mistakes God wanted her to remember.
It had all started here, in this house she never should have accepted. It had seemed safe enough at the time, a present from a man who loved her. In those days, she had still believed he would leave his wife.
Candlelight illuminated the streaks of condensation that slid down the too-thin glass windows.
When Mikaela was young, she used to love that condensation. She would shout to Rosa, Look, Mama, it’s raining inside the house.
Rosa wondered now if Mikaela had ever understood why her mother never came to stand beside her at the window. Rosa had seen tears instead of raindrops, had always known that this old house wept at the sadness it had seen.
Bad love.
It was the heart of this house; it had purchased every nail and paid most of the bills. It was mixed into the paint. Bad love had planted the hedge and made it grow tall; it had crafted the gravel walkway that led to a front door designed to conceal that love from all who would recognize it; it was woven into the fabric of the curtains that hid the windowpanes.
She had always known that she would pay for these sins. No amount of confession could cleanse her soul, but this … she’d never imagined this.
“Please God,” she said, “save mi hija …”
Again, silence. She knew that if she stepped outside, she would hear the rustling of the bare willow tree, and that it would sound like an old woman weeping.
With a tired sigh, she walked into her small bedroom, pulled her only suitcase out of the closet, and began to pack.
Chapter Four
