When I Found You by Brenda Novak

Twenty-One

Natasha was too new at work to call in sick. Aiyana was understanding and kind enough that she’d probably be gracious, even if Natasha did beg off, but that was all the more reason not to do it. After owning her practice, she knew what it was like to be on the employer’s side, and she didn’t want to take advantage of someone like Aiyana. She guessed Aiyana’s trust and inherent kindness was the reason she did so well with the broken boys she took under her wing. She was one of the few people Natasha had met who seemed to understand that love was the greatest healer there was, and she spread it around liberally.

Natasha left her mother sleeping in Lucas’s bed and hurried back to the fruit stand. After discovering the letter that gave Anya motive to shoot J.T., she’d been loath to park Anya’s car at her house. But she couldn’t leave it at the fruit stand much longer. The owner might call the cops to report an abandoned vehicle, and Natasha didn’t want to deal with the police. She’d decided to put the old Camry inside her garage until she could figure out what was going on—whether J.T. would recover, whether Anya was lying to her about what’d happened, whether she’d have to turn her own mother over to the authorities.

She was clammy with sweat by the time she’d moved the Camry and reached her Jetta at The Blue Suede Shoe so she could drive to work. She hated to show up at the school looking as though she could use another shower, but there was no way around that—not unless she was willing to be late. Everything had taken longer than expected.

She felt self-conscious as she walked into the administration building. It wasn’t that hot yet, but she drew attention just for being new, and now she looked like a wilted flower even though the day had just begun. She hadn’t slept much, had a headache from drinking at the club last night and was so worried about J.T.—whether he’d recover and how this latest development would affect his sons and her relationship with them—that she’d created sores on her fingertips from digging at her cuticles.

Eight hours.She could get through eight hours. She just hoped she didn’t have any emergencies to contend with. During her residency, she’d been trained to deal with almost anything, and to handle it on very little sleep, but this went beyond rest. She didn’t have any emotional reserves at the moment, either. She hoped the day would be uneventful and that she’d soon be able to get back to her mother, where, with any luck, she could get more coherent answers and a better idea of whether or not Anya had done the unthinkable.

“Good morning.”

A male voice at the door startled Natasha, nearly causing her to drop her coffee. As she was coming into the building, she’d cast a wary glance at the office in the back corner and gotten the impression that Aiyana was out. Betty May was in the reception area, punctual as always, but she’d been so busy dealing with the throng of students waiting to get help with various schedule issues, appointments with the school counselor or forms for a field trip or after-school activity that Natasha had been able to scoot past her with barely a nod. She’d stopped at the break room so she could fuel the next few hours with caffeine and slipped into her office, where she’d been safe.

Until Eli had appeared, seemingly out of nowhere.

“Hey.” She set her cup on her small desk so Aiyana’s son wouldn’t be able to spot her damaged cuticles. “How are you doing this morning?”

“Great,” he replied. “Just wanted to check with you to make sure you were okay with what happened at the club last night.”

Taken off guard, she blinked at him. “What was that?”

He checked behind him as if to make sure Betty May was still too busy to listen in. “My mother mentioned to me—maybe a day or two ago—that Roger was making himself a nuisance where you were concerned. So when he approached you last night, I didn’t know whether to step in. You seemed to be enjoying yourself, which is why I didn’t, but I thought I’d ask—for future reference.”

“Oh, no. He’s fine. You did the right thing. I needed a night out, and he was friendly and willing to dance.”

“I wouldn’t have thought twice about it, except—” he shifted uncomfortably “—when we left we saw your car was still in the lot, and...then I began to worry.”

“I didn’t go home with him,” she said with a laugh. “He gave me a ride because I’d let loose a little too much, if you know what I mean.”

“Of course. I’m glad you were able to have a good time,” he said with a kind smile, and she couldn’t help thinking how much he sounded like his mother.

Grateful she’d made it to work in spite of the difficulties of the past twenty-four hours, she sank into her chair. She’d purposely avoided looking at her phone this morning for fear she’d find more messages from the Amos brothers. But she knew it would only provoke them if she put off responding for too long.

She sighed as she checked her messages.

No more calls or texts from Dylan, Aaron, Rod or Grady. They’d reached out, made it clear they wanted to talk to her. Now they were waiting to see what she’d do. The ball was in her court, so to speak.

The only new message she’d received was from Mack. He’d responded to what she’d sent him in the middle of the night when she couldn’t sleep. She’d been hesitant to contact him. She’d known he could easily be awake, given what had occurred, and might try to call her if he realized she was up. Eventually, he, too, would ask where her mother was, and she wasn’t ready to contend with that moment.

Fortunately, he hadn’t asked yet. But now that she’d read his message, she almost wished she had talked to him. She was dying to get more information on how J.T. was doing, where he’d been shot and what damage had been done. As a doctor, she was especially interested in those details, so that she could form her own opinion on his chances of survival. But she was also longing to be part of their worry and their concern—as she would’ve been if it hadn’t been Anya who was probably to blame.

So do I, but we don’t know what’s going on yet, he’d said.

That told her nothing, and she hadn’t received anything else from him. Why didn’t they know more by now? Was J.T. dying?

She tried to imagine what must be going through Mack’s mind—through the minds of his brothers, too—and understood how betrayed and angry they must feel. She remembered how they’d reacted when Anya took her to meet them for the first time at a steak house in Sutter Creek. Anya had been so excited to get her hooks into them, so there’d be some benefit to having married J.T., she’d arranged the meeting before J.T. was even released from prison.

Although they’d been polite, Natasha had been able to tell they were far less excited to meet Anya than she was to meet them, and the way her mother had acted, as if she expected to be accepted as family right away, embarrassed Natasha. She’d sat at the table, sullen and angry and unable to eat, and somehow Dylan and the others had been able to understand the terrible position she was in as a young girl who had no control over the situation. Natasha honestly felt that, in the beginning, they’d put up with her mother for her sake as much as J.T.’s.

Then J.T. had gotten out after twenty years behind bars, and he’d had nowhere to go and no money, either, so the brothers had let him move in to the house, too. Natasha remembered being shocked by how entitled J.T. had acted. The house had been his in the beginning. Natasha understood that. But she didn’t feel as though Dylan, Mack and the others owed him anything. Without their hard work while J.T. was in prison, there would’ve been nothing left. No house. No business.

“Damn it,” she muttered as she straightened and re-straightened her small desk. She owed them so much. But she was all her mother had. How did she turn Anya in without first making sure it was the right thing to do?

Because she was trying not to obsess about it until she could get home and speak to her mother once again, and she was missing her little boy, she sent a text to Ace.

How’s Luke?

He didn’t respond. But Ace was often up late, gaming, so he could still be sleeping. She assumed it was his mother who was taking care of Lucas and hoped she’d hear from Ace later. She needed a bit of reassurance. Everything in her life seemed upside down right now, including Ace’s sudden interest in taking Luke for an extended visit. The paternity test and the threat of another man being Luke’s father seemed to have made Ace snap out of his selfish preoccupation and apathy.

That might prove to be a good thing for Luke in the long term. Natasha certainly hoped so. But what did it mean for her?

An eighth-grade girl entered her office with an eye infection. Natasha treated that, then cleaned a large scrape on the leg of a boy who’d tried to show his buddies that he could free solo up the side of the gymnasium.

As the morning progressed, Natasha kept checking her phone but received no answer from her ex.

Ace was trying to punish her, of course. He was sulking and, no doubt, hoping to make the days he had Lucas as difficult as possible.

Could at least one thing go her way? she wondered. And then, as she was getting her purse before going to lunch, a text finally came in.

It wasn’t from Ace. And she was relieved to see that it wasn’t from Grady, either, although Grady seemed to be the Amos brother who was the most insistent that she get in touch right away.

It was from Mack: I know you’re probably at work, and I hate to bother you there, but...do you know where your mother is?

Natasha couldn’t continue to function normally, not in the middle of what was happening now. She’d thought when she moved to Silver Springs that most of the wreckage in her life would stay behind her, that she’d be able to settle in and rebuild. She hadn’t expected to face yet another crisis, especially so soon, but this situation was serious enough that she went to Aiyana and told her privately that something had come up and she needed to take the rest of the week off.

As expected, Aiyana was understanding and supportive—so understanding and supportive that it brought tears to Natasha’s eyes.

“This isn’t about the paternity test, is it?” Aiyana asked, her forehead furrowed in concern when she saw Natasha’s emotional reaction.

“No. That didn’t turn out the way I’d hoped, but at least the man Lucas believes to be his father is really his father. That’s a good thing for him, I guess. It wouldn’t be easy to switch on him at this point.”

“I suppose that’s true. But something is obviously very wrong. His father isn’t being...threatening or...or anything like that, is he?”

Natasha managed a wobbly smile. “No. He’s not being nice, but he isn’t the one who’s causing this particular problem. This is...this is something else.” She didn’t want to go into it, didn’t want her boss to know she had a mother like Anya for fear it would reflect badly on her. That had been one of the benefits of becoming an adult; she and her mother no longer traveled or lived as a pair, so she’d been able to escape the stigma of Anya’s drug use and instability and build an entirely different kind of reputation for herself.

She also didn’t want Aiyana to suspect she was one of those people who went from one emotional upheaval to another, or created a problem if one didn’t exist. It was crazy that she’d lived such a consistent, uneventful life of study and professional pursuit for so long and then—wham—everything had crumbled around her and was still falling apart.

Fortunately, Aiyana didn’t press for details. Maybe she could tell that Natasha wasn’t yet ready to talk about it. “Well, whatever’s going on, I wish you the best with it,” she said.

“Thank you. I should have everything sorted out by Monday. I’m so sorry to do this to you, especially now, when I’ve barely started. I hope it doesn’t make you question your decision to hire me.”

“Of course not. We’re not that busy here at the school during the summer, so we’ll be fine. Take the time you need.”

She thanked Aiyana, gathered her stuff and left forty-five minutes early, as soon as the bell rang signaling the end of classes.

She had a long drive ahead of her, and she still needed to pack.

Mack had managed to grab a few hours of sleep, but after checking on his father and learning that J.T.’s condition hadn’t changed, he’d gone to the shop to help Grady and Rod stay on top of business.

Grady was working the desk today. Rod had insisted he stay away from the work going on in the back end. Grady had gotten even less sleep than Mack and was too bleary-eyed to do some of the detailing he usually did. So Mack had donned a jumpsuit and a mask, stepped into one of the paint stalls and painted a Dodge Charger a mustard yellow simply because the owner wanted to soup up his paint job, and a white Subaru that had been repaired after an accident.

He’d just pulled off his gloves and his respirator mask when Grady came out. “We closed for the day?” he asked.

“Not yet,” Grady replied.

“It’s after five.”

“I know, but Chase Hallow called. He needs to pick up his truck tonight. I said I’d wait for him.”

“When will he be here?”

“Ten minutes or so.”

Mack stripped off his jumpsuit, hung it on a peg and used the sleeve of his T-shirt to wipe the perspiration from his forehead. “I can stay and take care of Chase. You head home and get some sleep.”

“I’m not going home after this. I’m going to the hospital.”

Mack pulled off his booties. “Dylan and Cheyenne have been there all day, and Aaron is on his way to spell them. Why not grab a few hours while you have the chance?”

“Because I can’t sleep. I don’t want to sleep. Not until I know Anya isn’t going to get away with what she’s done. Have you heard from Natasha?”

Mack had texted Natasha earlier, but he’d received no response. “Not yet. You?”

“Nothing. She knows what her mother’s like. I can’t believe she’d ignore us. That she wouldn’t care about what her mother did to our father. That’s why I’m so pissed off.”

The memory of Natasha straddling him in bed, her hair tumbling down over her bare breasts as she moved, flashed through Mack’s mind, and he knew he’d never be able to be impartial. What he felt for Natasha would eventually pit him against the brothers he loved so much. There was no way to avoid it. “It’s not that she doesn’t care, bro. She’s in a difficult position.”

“Yeah, well, so’s Dad. He’s the one fighting for his life, remember? Granted, he hasn’t been much of a father to us, but he’s got as much right to live as anybody.”

“He’s going to pull through,” Mack said and hoped to God it was true.

“You don’t know that.”

“Well, he’s still breathing, isn’t he? It’s too soon to dig his grave. So lighten up on Natasha, will ya?”

“Don’t you care about Dad at all?” he asked.

“Of course I care,” Mack retorted. “I’m just trying to give her the benefit of the doubt.”

“No, you’re not. You’re already trying to protect her.”

“Maybe I am. But what else can I do? Her mother hasn’t been any better than our father, as far as parenting goes, but Anya’s Natasha’s only family.”

“Anya’s guilty of attempted murder—and the attempted part could go away any minute,” Grady snapped and whirled around, slamming the door to the front office as he went back in.

Mack pulled his phone from his pocket and navigated to his messages. I take it from your silence that you DO know where she is, he wrote.

She says she didn’t do it.

Mack frowned when he saw Natasha’s reply. Would she tell you if she did?