towel.
“I don’t remember getting up. I don’t remember going out.”
“Are you warm enough?”
“Yeah.” Except for the sheen of ice inside her bones. She wondered if any heat would ever reach that deep in her again. “I don’t know how long I was out there.”
“You’re back now.”
She reached back, laid a hand over his. He needed warmth and comfort as much as she did. “You found me.”
He pressed a kiss to her damp hair. “I always will.”
“You took Lily’s monitor.” And that, she thought, meant even more. “You remembered to take it. You didn’t leave her alone.”
“Hayley.” He wrapped his arms around her, pressed his cheek to hers. “I won’t leave either of you alone.” Then laid a hand on her belly. “Any of you. I swear it.”
“I know. She doesn’t believe in promises, or faith, or love. I do. I believe in us, with everything I’ve got.” She turned her head so her lips could brush his. “I didn’t always, but I do now. I have everything. She has nothing.”
“You can feel sorry for her? After this? After everything?”
“I don’t know what I feel for her. Or about her.” It felt so wonderful to be able to lean her head back, rest it on his good, strong shoulder. “I thought I understood her, at least a little. We were both in a kind of similar situation. I mean, getting pregnant, and not wanting the baby at first.”
“You’re nothing alike.”
“Harper, erase the personalities, and your feelings for just a minute. Look at it objectively, like you do at work. Look at the situation. We were both unmarried and pregnant. Not loving the father, not wanting to see our lives changed, burdened even. Then coming to want the baby. In different ways, for different reasons, but coming to want the baby so much.”
“Different ways and different reasons,” he repeated. “But all right, I can see that, on the surface, there’s a pattern.”
The door opened. Roz came in with a tray. “I’m not going to disturb you. Harper, you see that she drinks this.” After setting the tray at the foot of the bed, Roz skirted around to the side. She took Hayley’s face in her hand, kissed her cheek. “You get some rest.”
Harper reached out, took Roz’s hand for a moment. “Thanks, Mama.”
“You need anything, you call.”
“She didn’t have anyone to take care of her,” Hayley said quietly when the door closed behind Roz. “No one to care about her.”
“Who did she care about? Who did she care for? Obsession isn’t caring,” he added before Hayley could speak. He eased away to get up, pour the tea. “What was done to her sucked big-time. No argument, no debate. But you know what? There aren’t any heroes in her sad story.”
“There should be. There should always be heroes. But no.” She took the tea. “She wasn’t heroic. Not even tragic, like Juliet. She’s just sad. And bitter.”
“Calculating,” he added. “And crazy.”
“That, too. She wouldn’t have understood you. I think I know her well enough now to be sure of that. She wouldn’t have understood your heart, or your honesty. That’s sad, too.”
He walked to the doors. He was getting the soaker he’d wished for and could stand there, watch the earth drink in the rain.
“She was always sad.” He reached inside, beyond his anger and found the pity. “I could see it even when I was a kid, and she’d be in my room, singing. Sad and lost. Still I felt safe with her, the way you do when you’re with someone you know cares about you. She cared, on some level, for me, for my brothers. I guess that has to count for something.”
“She still cares, I feel that. She just gets confused. Harper, I can’t remember.”
She lowered the cup, and emotion swam into her eyes. “Not like I could the other times it happened. I could see, at least a part of me could. I don’t know how to explain. But this time, it’s mixed up, and I can’t see. Not all of it. Why was she going into the ballroom? What did she do there?”
He wanted to tell her to relax, not to think. But how could she? Instead he came back, sat by her. “You went to the carriage house. You must have. The door was open, and I could see where you’d walked back to the kitchen. The floor was wet.”
“That’s where she went that night, the night she died here. She had to have died here that night. Nothing else makes sense. We saw her that time, you and me. Standing out on the terrace, wet and muddy. She had a rope.”
“There could’ve been rope in the carriage house. Probably was.”
“Why would she need a rope to get the baby? To tie up the nursemaid?”
“I don’t think that’s why she wanted rope.”
“She had that sickle thing, too.” Bright and gleaming, she remembered. Sharp. “Maybe she was going to kill anyone who tried to stop her. But the rope. What would she do with rope besides tie somebody up?”
Her eyes widened and she set the cup down with a rattle when she read the look in his eyes.
“Oh my God. To kill herself? To hang herself, is that what you’re thinking? But why? Why would she come all the way out here? Why would she drag herself through the rain, and hang herself in the ballroom?”
“The nursery was on the third floor back then.”
What little color had come back into her cheeks drained again. “The nursery.”
No, she thought as the image played in her mind, she might never be truly warm again.
ON HER DAYS off, Hayley was used to the hours flying by. The time was so crowded with chores—shopping, laundry, organizing what had gotten disorganized during workdays, caring for Lily and the myriad tasks that turned up—she barely remembered what it was like to have what those who didn’t have full-time jobs and a toddler called free time.
Who knew she liked it that way?
Finding herself with time on her hands left her feeling broody and restless. But when the boss ordered you to take the day off, there was no arguing. At least not when the boss was Rosalind Harper.
She’d been banished to Stella’s house for the day without even Lily as a distraction. She’d been told to rest, and she’d tried. Really she had. But her usual delight in reading didn’t satisfy her; the stack of DVDs Stella had handed her didn’t entertain, and the quiet, empty house kept her counting the minutes rather than lulling her into a nap.
She passed some of the time roaming the rooms, rooms she’d helped paint. Stella and Logan had turned it into a home, mixing Stella’s flair for detail and style with Logan’s sense of space. And the boys, of course, she thought as she paused outside of the room Gavin and Luke shared with its bunk beds and shelves loaded with comic books and trucks. It was a home created with children in mind, lots of light and color, the big yard that bumped right up to kiss the woods. Even with the elegance of gardens—and how could the landscaping be anything but beautiful here —it was a yard where kids and a dog could romp around.
She picked up Parker—the dog had been her only company through the day—and nuzzled him as she walked back downstairs.
Would she be as clever as Stella with a home and family? As loving and smart and sane?
She’d never planned it this way. Stella was the one for plans. She’d just cruised along, happy enough with her job at the bookstore, helping her father tend the little house they shared. Now and again she’d thought about taking a few extra classes in business—to prepare for the vague dream of opening her own bookstore. One day.
She’d thought about falling in love—one day. Most girls did, she imagined. But she hadn’t been in any hurry for it, for the big love, and what followed. Permanency, home, kids. The whole minivan, soccer-mom routine had been distant as the moon in her head. Years off. Light-years off.
But things had happened that had pushed her in directions she’d never expected to go. So here she was, not yet twenty-six, pregnant with her second child, working in a field she’d known next to nothing about two years before.
And so stupidly in love she was all but breathing valentines.
Just to ice that cake, a cryptic and certainly psychopathic spirit had decided to borrow her body from time to
