trouble. The board, it hit her on the head, and when she was underwater, she was scared. She did not know up from down.” She noticed the way Liam’s fingers tightened around the bed rail, and she understood. “Do not be afraid, Dr. Liam. Mikaela is like Jacey. She is lost in a place she cannot understand. She will need us to guide her home. All we have is our voices, our memories. We must use these as … flashlights to show her the way.”
Liam’s gaze softened. “I’m glad you’re here, Rosa.”
“Sí. It is hard to be alone for something like this.”
He flinched at the word alone, and she knew what he was thinking, that without his wife, there would be a lifetime of alone. He had his children, sí, whom he loved, but still there was a kind of loneliness that only a lover could ease. This, Rosa knew too well.
And one thing Rosa knew about Liam—she’d known it from the first time she saw him, almost twelve years ago—he loved his Mikaela. Loved her in the bone-deep way that most women long for and only a handful ever find.
Rosa couldn’t help wondering if Mikaela knew this, if she understood her good fortune. Or if, in some dark, forbidden corner of her heart, there grew the untamed remains of an old, bad love.
Rosa knew how deep the roots of that love had gone into her daughter’s heart, and she knew, too, that sometimes a first love went to seed, growing in wild disarray until there was no room for anything—or anyone—else.
Rosa spent almost an hour with her daughter, then she left Liam at Mikaela’s bedside and went in search of her grandchildren.
Jacey and Bret were in the waiting room, sitting together on the sofa, their arms wrapped around each other.
It took her a moment to find her voice. “Children?”
With a cry, Jacey pulled out of her brother’s arms and hurled herself at Rosa.
“It will be all right, niña,” Rosa said over and over again, holding her granddaughter.
Bret sat quietly on the couch, sucking his thumb.
Rosa eased away from Jacey and went to the sofa. In front of Bret, she knelt. “Hola, my little man.”
Bret’s red-rimmed eyes looked huge in the tear-streaked pallor of his face. “She’s dead, Grandma.”
“She is alive, Bret, and she needs us now.” Slowly Rosa took hold of Bret’s right hand, tugging gently until the thumb popped out of his mouth. Then she pressed her hands against his in prayer. “These hands of ours, they are for praying.”
Jacey layered her hands on top of theirs.
Rosa bowed her head and began to pray: “Our Father, Who art in Heaven …” She let the words fill her aching heart. It was the prayer she’d offered to God every day since her First Communion more than five decades before.
At last Bret and Jacey joined their voices to the prayer.
The house was quiet now, not like it should be at nine-thirty in the evening, but the way it had become.
Jacey was in Mike’s office, surfing the Internet for a school report. Liam came up behind her.
“How’s it going?” he asked, squeezing her shoulder gently.
She looked up. Her eyes were still a little puffy; he knew she was like all of them, prone to sudden, unexpected tears. “Okay, I guess.”
“We could move the computer into the living room if—”
“No. I … like being in her office. I can feel her in here. Sometimes I forget and think she’ll poke her head in here and say, ‘That’s enough, kiddo, I need to use the computer.’” Jacey tried to smile. “It’s better than the quiet.”
Liam knew what she meant. “Well, don’t stay up too late.”
“Okay.”
He left her there, in that room that held Mike’s presence like a favorite scent, and headed to Bret’s room.
He knocked on his son’s door. There was a scuffling noise from inside, then a quiet “Come in.”
He opened the door. The room was dark except for a small Batman night-light that tossed a triangle of golden light toward the bed, and a skylight cut into the sharply angled ceiling that revealed the starry night sky, making the room seem almost like an astronaut’s capsule.
“Heya, kiddo.”
“Hi, Daddy.”
It was a baby’s voice that came out of the darkness, not at all the voice of a nine-year-old boy who’d hit his first home run last spring, and the sound of it brought Liam to a halt.
When he realized he wasn’t moving, he forced a watered-down laugh. “Sorry. I think I just stepped