“About where you went this afternoon.” Sam caught her chin, forcing her gaze up to meet his. “You went to see your mother, didn’t you?”
Her heart skipped a beat. “What makes you think that?”
“Carl Madison called to check on you while you were in the shower. He was worried he couldn’t get you on your cell phone and wondered if seeing your mother again had been too much for you.” Sam ran his thumb over the curve of her chin. “Was it?”
Kristen glanced at Maddy’s bedroom door. “Do we have to talk about this tonight?”
He dropped his hand. “Not if you don’t want to.”
She threw him an exasperated look, hating how much she wanted to tell him everything she’d been through that day. Right now, a pair of warm, strong arms wrapped around her seemed like the most necessary thing in the world.
She settled for admitting, “I didn’t think I wanted to.”
“But now you do?”
She made a growling noise deep in her throat and walked away, heading for the darkened living room. Her shin made contact with the end table by the sofa, sending pain shooting up her leg. She uttered a quiet, heartfelt curse and fumbled for the lamp switch. A twist of the knob later, lamplight flooded half the room, illuminating the sofa.
With a sigh of surrender, Kristen turned to look at Sam. “A couple of days ago, my mother’s doctor called Carl, asking for me. He told Carl my mother wanted to see me.”
“And Carl called you,” Sam guessed correctly. “That was the call you took the day Norah arrived, right? The one that had you so upset.”
She briefly considered arguing with him about his assessment of her mood that day, but he was right. The call had scared the hell out of her, among other things.
She slumped onto the nearest sofa cushion, wrapping her arms around herself. “I told Carl I didn’t want to see her.”
“I remember.”
She licked her lips. “But the doctor called me today.”
Sam sat beside her, careful to leave her plenty of space, she noticed bleakly. Apparently she was giving off major “don’t touch” vibes.
“Is it the first time you’ve seen her since she was committed?” he asked gently.
She met his curious gaze, her lips twisting in a wry smile. “Yeah. Probably the last, too.”
“Why did you decide to see her after all this time?”
She supposed it wouldn’t hurt to tell him about Bryant Thompson. She reached for the jacket she’d left draped over the arm of the sofa and pulled the clipping from the pocket. “Because of this.”
Sam frowned as he took in the article. “I thought you said it wasn’t related to the attempted kidnapping.”
“I don’t think it is. Someone visited my mother yesterday, out of the blue. He brought her this photo.”
Sam looked puzzled. “Who would do that? And why?”
“That’s what I’m going to have to find out.” She took back the clipping and put it in her pocket. “But that’s my mystery, not yours.” The last thing she wanted to do was involve Sam in her life any more than he was already, not when she was on the verge of walking away for good.
A clean break would be better for everyone, right?
“You helped me with mine. Maybe I could help you with yours,” he offered.
She had to smile at the offer. “How do you plan to do that, Sherlock?”
He brushed a lock of hair away from her cheek. Her smile faded, replaced by a tremble in her lips that had nothing to do with fear and everything to do with the crackling heat simmering low in her belly. “Maybe we could start with why seeing your mother after all this time bothered you so much,” he murmured.
She grimaced, trying not to lean any closer to him. “That’s not really a mystery, is it?”
“Do you ever talk about what happened to you?”
She shook her head. “Not if I can help it.”
“But you still think about it.”
“Every day.” She sighed. “Look, Sam, I appreciate what you’re trying to do here. But there are some things I can’t-” She broke off with a wince, unable to find the words.
In his eyes, she saw his internal struggle. He wanted to help her-she saw the urge so clearly that she found herself feeling sorry for him. Poor Sam, trying to break through a decade and a half of walls she’d built to protect herself, she thought. She loved him a little bit for it, even though she wasn’t sure she’d ever let those walls fall completely.
Silence stretched between them, taut and uncomfortable. Kristen closed her fingers around her knees, squeezing tightly as she struggled against the tears burning behind her eyes. She felt words hammering the back of her throat, struggling to find a voice, but she had no idea what to say.
When she finally opened her mouth and let the words spill out, they were the last thing she expected. “My mother asked me to bring Maddy to see her.”
“What?”
She turned to look at him, hating herself for putting that look of horror on his face. “Forget it. It doesn’t matter. I’m not going to see her again.”
“Why did she want to see Maddy? Why did she think you’d ever do such a thing?”
Kristen scraped her hair away from her face. “She’s crazy, Sam. She looked at that newspaper clipping and that’s what she got out of it. That I had access to your four-year-old daughter and I could bring Maddy by to see her.”
She could see Sam floundering for a response to such madness. “How-what-?”
She gave a huff of brittle, mirthless laughter. “Yeah, my thoughts exactly.” Her laughter died in her throat as the nightmare of her past swooped in like a vulture, feeding off her pain. “She said she missed her little ones so much.”
Sam looked sick. “My God.”
The tears she’d been fighting reached critical mass, spilling over her lower eyelids and trickling down her cheeks in hot streaks. “She thought-” She had to stop, swallowing hard before starting again, her voice low and choked. “She thought I’d bring Maddy there to her because she missed her babies. The babies she stabbed to death and left bleeding where they lay.” She broke off with a soft, bleating sob.
“Oh, honey.” Sam wrapped his arm around her, pulling her close. She turned, burying her face against his throat, needing the warm, solid strength of his body against hers more than she’d expected.
She cried wordlessly a few seconds, then pulled back, wiping at the tears with her knuckles. “I don’t know how much you know about what happened-”
“Just a few things people told me,” he admitted.
“She’d always been, I don’t know…scattered. Not very dependable. I don’t really remember if she was always that way or if it just started after my father left us. I just know I was eight years old and suddenly I was the mommy of the household.” She’d been so scared, as the days turned into weeks and she realized that her mother’s little “spells” weren’t going to go away. “I made lunch for the little ones, and if there were dishes to be washed or clothes to be laundered, I did most of that, too. Mama would do things if I asked her to, but she never seemed to think of them herself.”
Sam made a low, murmuring sound of encouragement. “That must have been so hard for you.”
She pushed her hair back from her damp face. “She kept telling me that I had to help her keep things together or the government would take us all away from her and split us up.”
“There was nobody to look out for you and your brothers and sisters?” Sam asked, his voice unspeakably sad.
“My grandparents on my mother’s side were dead, and I never had anything to do with my father’s parents. I couldn’t even tell you their names.” She unclenched her fingers, flexing them in front of her. They felt cold and numb. “I did everything I could to keep the neighbors and our teachers from finding out how bad it was, because I was terrified the social workers would separate us.” She gave another soft, defeated sob. “I should have let them. We’d all still be alive.”
He shook his head. “You were a kid. You didn’t know how bad it would get. Apparently nobody did.”
