One More Knight

and shame. She discovered that somehow in growing up she had lost the ability to tell herself those fantasy stories wherein she composed both sides of the dialogue, and could always count on things to come out the way she wanted them to. In the end she’d thrown the numbers away.

Maybe someday, she’d told herself. But first she had to go back to Mourning Spring. After that…she’d see.

But oh, God, in her wildest dreams and worst nightmares she had never imagined this.

My son. Mine and Colin’s.

Colin Stewart Phelps.

Cutter. He’s called Cutter.

The ICU nurse was talking to him now, touching his arm, guiding him away from the glass partition. Charly could hear his voice, muffled but tense with anger. She could see the tension in his strong, young body, the flush of anger on his smooth cheeks, the shadows of exhaustion and fear around his eyes-Colin’s eyes-as he twisted around to stare back at her.

Flinging her father a last, desperate look, Charly started after her son. But she seemed scarcely to be moving. Oh, God, she’d had this nightmare so many times-her body weighted and weak, her heart trying to leap out of her chest as she strained to run, to reach out, to pursue! Her throat aching with the pressure of her own voice screaming his name…and making no sound at all.

But she must have made some sound, because just as he reached the waiting-room doorway he turned his head and saw her. For a moment he seemed to freeze. Then he pivoted and came back a few steps, holding up a hand like a traffic cop to stop her in her tracks.

It worked. She halted, and a few feet away from her, so did he. Even with that distance between them, she could feel his body shaking. Her heart melted, aching for him.

Dear God, she thought, I’ve already hurt him so much. What am I doing here?

“What the hell are you doing here?” he demanded in a cracking voice. Such a young voice. “This is family.”

“Cutter,” Charly said in a sticking voice, trying out the name for the first time. “I’m-”

“I know who you are,” her son cut in. He had his grandfather’s voice, Charly thought. And his manner, too, as he bulldozed right over her feeble attempt to respond. “What the hell are you doing here? Haven’t you done him enough hurt? You want to kill him, is that it?”

“Cutter!” Dobrina stood just inside in the waiting-room doorway, her face the color of old ashes, her eyes shooting fire from the shadows of their sockets, a high priestess about to call down the wrath of the gods upon all their heads. “Cutter Phelps, you mind your language and your manners, you hear me, boy?”

Cutter stood his ground, his eyebrows lowering in a way that reminded Charly so much of the judge it almost made her smile. “She’s got no right,” he muttered, riled and furious. “He wouldn’t want her here.”

“How do you know?” Dobrina demanded. “He tell you that?”

“Look,” Charly began in an airless croak, “I don’t-”

Her son rounded on her then, jerking away from Dobrina’s restraining hand. “Well, I don’t want you here, okay? So you can just go back to wherever you came from. You are not needed here, understand? You are not welcome here. So you can just…go. Right now. Go on, get out of here. Leave us alone!”

I don’t want you here. The words were like a wind in her ears, drowning out even the sound of her own pain. She could see Dobrina’s lips moving, knew her own throat must be forming words in reply, but she heard nothing.

Go…now. Cold as she was, numb as she was, somehow she found a way to make her body obey. Just as she had twenty years before, Charly left her son, walked away from him down a hospital corridor and did not look back.

“So that’s about the size of it,” Troy said into the phone. He gave a half-embarrassed chuckle and lowered his voice even though there wasn’t anybody around him to hear it. “I’m tellin’ you, little brother, I’m startin’ to feel like maybe I’ve bit off more’n I can chew.”

“Well, now, that’s a new one,” said Jimmy Joe.

“I mean it. I used to think I could handle myself in just about any situation, you know? But this…ah, hell, I think I’m outta my league here, man.” He let his breath out in a hiss of frustration and ran a hand over his hair. “I don’t know what the hell’s goin’ on.”

“Goin’ on? With what? Who? You mean-”

“I mean with her-Charly.”

“Ah.”

“She’s got…stuff goin’ on here. She’s havin’ a pretty hard time with it-I don’t just mean her dad havin’ this heart attack, either. I’m pretty sure it’s more complicated than that. Anyway, I’d like to help her, you know? Only she won’t tell me much about what’s goin’ on, and I…well, hell, you know how it is. I don’t want to be stickin’ my nose in where it doesn’t belong, but…”

“Uh-huh,” said Jimmy Joe. And then for a few minutes there was silence, while all sorts of things flew back and forth along the wires unspoken, the way they do sometimes between guys who are close to one another but unaccustomed to expressing their deepest feelings in words.

Then there was a little throat-clearing sound, and Jimmy Joe said, “I ever tell you how I came to meet Mirabella?”

“I heard the story,” said Troy cautiously. “Picked her up in your truck, right? Somewhere out in the Texas Panhandle in a blizzard? Delivered her baby on Christmas Day and made the national news.”

His brother chuckled. “Well, there was a little bit more to it than that.” He paused. “See, I’d run into her before all that happened, over in New Mexico. I noticed her right away-hard not to, you know, pregnant as she was, and lookin’ like she does. Anyway, I kept wonderin’ about her-what she was doin’ out there like that, pregnant and all alone, so close to Christmas. The more I thought about it, the more it didn’t make sense to me. And the more it bothered me. But I was like you-I didn’t think it was any of my business, didn’t think it was my place to ask.”

“Uh-huh,” said Troy, listening intently now.

“Well, then, of course, the more I got involved with her, the more I wanted to know about her. And I kept tellin’ myself it still wasn’t any of my business. And then somewhere along the way I came to a point where…”

He paused, and Troy prompted, “Yeah?”

“I knew it was my business,” said Jimmy Joe.

“Ah,.” And there was another of those silences, vibrant with unvoiced truths and revelations. Presently Troy let out a breath and said gruffly, “So, how do you know?” He coughed. “When you’ve reached that point, I mean.”

His brother’s chuckle was one he’d never heard before-gentle, contented and wise. “You’ll know.”

After that there wasn’t much Troy could do but say his goodbyes and sign off, feeling not a whole lot less frustrated than when he’d dialed. He was just hanging up the phone when he saw Charly coming down the hallway. He shoved his calling card back in his billfold and started toward her, still jabbing with it at his hip pocket. Took a couple of steps, got close enough to get a good look at her face and stopped, while his insides turned to ice water.

“Bad news?” he asked softly.

“What?” Her eyes lost their glaze and focused on him. “Oh, no, no, it’s okay, he’s asleep. No point in staying. Let’s go, okay?” Her voice sounded breathy but with a little catch in it, as if, he thought, she’d been running with the hounds of hell on her tai.

As tuned to her as he was, it took him a beat longer than it should have to notice the two people down at the end of the corridor by the ICU, the place Charly had just come from. But he still had a lot of his SEAL reflexes, and when a distant movement flicked at his peripheral vision, he glanced that way first, then focused in a little harder. He could see it was the housekeeper-Dobrina, was it?-standing in the entrance to the waiting area. But who was the guy with her? A young guy, real young. Hardly more than a kid.

“Who’s that?” he asked, keeping it as casual as he could.

Charly didn’t even look, just hunched her shoulders and muttered, “Nobody. Let’s just go, okay?” She sounded as if her jaws had been wired together.

Which was about the way Troy felt, too. There was a red-hot poker of tension shooting up through his neck muscles, right between his jaws and into his temples. He kept having to remind himself to unclench his teeth.