by then, was next on the agenda. Madison and Kendra made peanut butter and jelly sandwiches in the impossibly small kitchen, and Kendra poured a glass of milk for both of them.
Daisy settled herself near Madison’s chair, ears perked forward, nose raised to sniff the air, probably hoping that manna, in the form of scraps of a PB and J, might fall from heaven.
Martie had been adamant on that point, though. No people food and very few treats. The treat a dog needed most, she’d said, was plenty of love and affection.
When the meal was over and the table had been cleared, Madison announced, yawning, that Daisy had had a big morning and therefore needed a nap.
Amused—Madison normally napped only under protest—Kendra suggested that they ought to change out of their church clothes first.
Madison put on pink cotton shorts and a blue short-sleeved shirt, and Kendra opted for jeans and a lightweight green pullover. When she came out of the bedroom, Madison and Daisy were already curled up together on the new fleece dog bed, and Kendra didn’t have the heart to raise an objection.
Lie down with dogs, get up with fleas, she heard her grandmother say.
Shut up, Gramma, was her silent response.
“Sleep tight,” she said aloud, taking a book from the shelf and stepping outside, planning to sit in the shade of the maple trees and read for a while.
The scene was idyllic—bees buzzing, flowers nodding their many-colored heads in the light breeze, the big Montana sky sweeping blue and cloudless and eternal overhead.
Kendra relaxed as she read, and at some point, she must have dozed off, because she opened her eyes suddenly and found Hutch Carmody standing a few feet away, big as life.
She blinked a couple of times, but he didn’t disappear.
Not a dream, then. Crap.
“Sorry,” he said without a smidgeon of regret. “Didn’t mean to wake you.”
Kendra straightened and glanced toward the open doorway of the cottage, looking for Madison. There was no sign of either the child or the dog, but Kendra went inside to check on them anyway. They were both sleeping, curled up together on Daisy’s cloud-soft bed.
Quietly, Kendra went back outside to face Hutch.
How could she not have heard him arrive? His truck was parked right there in the driveway, a stone’s throw from where she’d been sitting. At the very least, she should have heard the tires in the gravel or the closing of the driver’s door.
“What are you doing here?” she whispered, too rattled to be polite.
Hutch spread his hands wide, grinning. “I’m unarmed,” he said, sidestepping the question. He was, she recalled, a master at sidestepping any topic he didn’t want to discuss. “Don’t shoot.”
Kendra huffed out a sigh, picked up her book, which she’d dropped in the grass when she’d woken up to an eyeful of Hutch, and held it tightly against her side. “What. Are. You. Doing. Here?” she repeated.
He gestured for her to sit down, and since her knees were weak, she dropped back into her lawn chair. He drew another one up alongside hers and sat. They were both gazing straight ahead, like two strangers in the same row on an airplane, intent on the seat belt/oxygen mask lecture from an invisible flight attendant.
“Tell me about your little girl,” Hutch finally said.
“Why should I?” Kendra asked reasonably, proud of her calm tone.
“I guess because she could have been ours,” he replied.
For a moment, Kendra felt as if he’d elbowed her, hard, or even punched her in the stomach. Once the adrenaline rush subsided, though, she knew there was no point in withholding the information.
A person could practically throw a rock from one end of Parable to the other and juicy stories got around fast.
“You’ll hear about it soon enough,” she conceded, though ungraciously, keeping her voice down in case Madison woke up and somehow homed in on the conversation, “so I might as well tell you.”
Hutch gave a long-suffering sigh and she felt him looking in her direction now, though she was careful not to meet his gaze. “Might as well,” he agreed quietly.
“Not that it’s any of your business,” Kendra pointed out.
He simply waited.
Distractedly, Kendra wondered if the man thought she’d given birth to Madison herself and kept her existence hidden from everyone in Parable all this time.
“Madison is adopted,” she said. It was a simple statement, but it left her feeling as though she’d spilled her guts on some ludicrous tell-all TV show.
“Why do I think there’s more to the story?” Hutch asked