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The Babes, their husbands, and their offspring quickly circled round, but Rayna Jo barely noticed.
“Mama, what is it?” Devon asked.
Rayna Jo watched as Adam Shipley held out a hand, and she gratefully shoved the envelope in his direction.
After a few seconds of reading, Adam looked grim.
“Richard’s estate is being sued by the family of the young woman who died in the accident.”
“What?”
“Are you serious?”
“Can they do that?”
“Why?”
“How much?” Rayna Jo asked, the words a raw whisper. “What do they want?”
Adam’s gaze shifted to hers, and she fought off the urge to be sick because she could tell it was bad.
“Five million dollars.”
Devon hadn’t thought things could get worse than they already were, but obviously that wasn’t true. As they piled into the limo and cars and made their way back to the house, all she could think about was how unfair life was.
Her father was responsible for the accident. For the affair. For the woman’s death.
But her mother might lose everything because of it.
How was this possible? What kind of a world made this okay? Where was the justification?
“Well, look who showed up after the fact,” Dara muttered.
They’d arrived at the house and gathered their belongings to go in when Devon heard her sister speak.
Devon looked at Dara and then out the window, spotting Ted getting out of a large SUV. Anger filled her. Then something she wasn’t sure she could identify since Oz’s kiss came to mind, and she wondered if she owed Ted an apology as much as he owed her one. Did a kiss she didn’t initiate after telling Ted she was returning his ring qualify as cheating?
No, she decided. It didn’t.
“Who is that?” Rayna Jo asked.
“Ted,” Devon said. “He’s my… It’s Ted, Mama.”
The door to the limo opened, and Devon surged out, remembering her manners enough to thank the driver before forcibly taking slow steps toward the man she’d given up hope of seeing.
She wanted to rush, to race into his arms and have him hold her, comfort her like a man who loved her would, but something held her back. A combination of anger and guilt and all the emotions ranging between the two. “You’re here,” she said simply when she got within speaking distance.
“I am. I went to the burial, but I arrived late and didn’t want to make a scene walking up to the gravesite.”
He’d been there? She didn’t stop but kept walking, leaving it up to him whether or not he followed.
Devon unlocked the door and entered the house.
“Devon?”
So he had followed her. “I’m going up to change. Wait there.” She knew Ted hated being told anything, but the last thing she wanted was for him to follow her up the stairs to the privacy of her bedroom when she needed time to sort through her emotions.
It was rude not to introduce him to her family now that he’d made the trip, but in her upset, she needed a few minutes to decompress.
