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tried, to the one man who should have supported her, the attempt had ended in disaster.
She walked up and down the pier. Finally Colt reached for her arm and pulled her to a stop. “Sit with me. You’ve made me tired just watching you.”
They sat and Colt pulled off his boots and socks, then allowed his feet to dangle in the water. “Brrr … I thought the water might have warmed up by now but it’s still just short of freezing. Honey, did something else happen in Africa?”
“Yes,” she responded before she realized he’d tricked her with a distraction.
“Tell me about it.”
Sage closed her eyes, dropped her head back and lifted her face toward the dying light. In her mind’s eye, she saw the children. She heard the singing from the missionary school. “Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so.”
A laboring mother’s moan as she expelled a brand-new life into Sage’s waiting hands. “It’s a girl.”
The sound of a truck.
No. Sage jerked her head down and banished the memory, but not before the old, familiar guilt flooded her body. Tears welled in her eyes and grateful, she allowed them to fall.
She wept silently, shedding healing tears that she believed were a gift from God working through the man she loved. As always, Colt was there for her, supporting her, waiting for her to trust him with the truth.
Trust. That’s what everything hinged on, wasn’t it? In her heart of hearts, she knew that in order to put that awful time behind her, to finally embrace the healing that Colt, her friends, this town and this valley offered to her, she would have to open up and tell him about her biggest secret, her greatest shame. Trust.
“It was six months after I … after the other incident I told you about. Peter and I and some nurses had traveled to a village down toward the border.”
Colt reached out and took her hand, lacing their fingers. “We’d been there two days. People came from all over.”
Jesus loves me, this I know.
She exhaled a shuddering breath. “A woman had been in labor for days. Adaeze.”
Jesus loves me, this I know.
“Dr. Sage. Dr. Sage. You must help my wife.”
Seated on the fishing pier of Hummingbird Lake, tears streaming steadily down her face, she said, “I did an emergency cesarean.”
The sound of a truck.
Jesus loves me, this I know.
Sage tugged her hand from his and wrapped her arms around herself. She shook her head, rocking slowly back and forth, the pain inside her as sharp as a machete’s blade. “I can’t. I’m sorry. I thought I could, but I can’t.”
“It’s okay, baby,” Colt said, shifting behind her so that his arms wrapped around hers. He held her as she rocked, holding in the horror. “You will when you’re ready.”
I’m not ready.
Spit it out, girl. I don’t have time for this nonsense. Daddy!
“Don’t leave me.”
“I won’t,” Colt murmured. “I’m not going anywhere. I won’t let you down, love.”
“Maybe not, but I’ll let you down. I’m broken, Colt.”
“Then we’ll put you back together again.”
Humpty Dumpty sat on the wall. Humpty Dumpty had a great fall. Jesus loves me, this I know. “All the king’s horses, all the king’s men …”
“Shush, baby.” He rocked with her. “We’ll fix you. I’m a great fixer. You wait and see.”
Jesus loves me, this I know.
“How can you not know?” Colt demanded of the woman he hoped would someday be his sister-in-law. Since Sage had left with Snowdrop early this morning to spend part of her day off in Gunnison at the groomer’s, he’d used this opportunity to invite Rose to his office. He’d been grilling her about her sister for the past five minutes, and his discouragement was beginning to show. “If she’s this distraught five years after the fact, she must have been looney tunes when she arrived back in the States.”
“I told you, I didn’t see her,” Rose responded. She sat in an office chair opposite his desk and her gaze kept straying to his window. “She was in New York, said she was busy interviewing and that she’d get home as soon as she could manage. We talked on the phone and she seemed fine.”
She hadn’t been fine, Colt knew. She’d needed her family. They should have been there for her. “Why didn’t you and your father go see her? She’d been out of the country for some time, hadn’t she?”
“We didn’t know she’d come home,” Rose explained, obviously annoyed. “I still don’t