“Have you met them?” he asked. “Do you even know what they’re like?”
“They’ve been staying with me for over a week. They’re at the cabin in Tahoe right now, waiting for me to come back. We’re planning to spend the rest of the summer together.”
“What are they like?”
“Normal people. Good people. Smart. One has a daughter who’s four. Lucy. She’s sweet.”
He let go of her hand and stood up to finish dressing. “Can’t they shed some light on the past?”
She’d liked sitting there on the bed with him, her hand in his. It had felt reassuring, comforting. But she couldn’t attempt to have a relationship right now, especially with Sawyer. “Unfortunately not. Lorelei was either abandoned or lost as a toddler. She was found in the middle of a busy intersection in Orlando and raised in foster care. The other one—Reagan—was raised as an only child in New York City. Her mother is a successful clothing designer who claims her father died when she wasn’t quite two.”
His head came through his T-shirt. “Claims? You think her father might be your uncle Vance?”
“After reading that letter, don’t you?”
Before he could answer, there was a loud banging at the door.
“Sawyer? I know you’re in there, damn it! I drove by last night and your truck hasn’t moved. You’d better open up and give me those pictures of Sean, or I’m calling the police to tell them Serenity’s trying to steal his property!”
“It’s Nina.” Serenity’s heart began to pound as she hopped up and started digging through her drawers for a pair of yoga pants.
Fortunately, Sawyer was already dressed, but his hair was standing up on one side and with that beard growth on his face, Serenity wasn’t optimistic that Nina would believe he’d just arrived. Nina had already said she’d seen Sawyer’s truck outside last night and it hadn’t moved.
“Shit,” she muttered.
He shot her a look that told her to calm down. “We haven’t done anything wrong. Doesn’t matter what they think,” he insisted and went out to answer the door.
Although Serenity remained in the bedroom, she could hear everything Nina said. Sean’s mother accused him of all kinds of terrible things—that he’d probably planted those pictures on Sean’s computer to frame him and steal his wife, that he’d been jealous of Sean his whole life, that he didn’t have an ounce of loyalty in him.
He responded with admirable restraint—tried to keep his voice low and talk some sense into her—so when Nina screamed that he was no better than a parasite and they should never have taken him in, Serenity threw down the yoga pants she’d been shaking too badly to put on and marched out of the bedroom in her underwear and sweatshirt.
“Get off my porch right now,” she said, pointing toward Nina’s car at the curb, “or I’ll be the one to call the police. And don’t you ever contact me or come to my house again. Do you understand? I don’t care what excuse you think up. If I find something of your son’s—your pedophile son who’s in prison for his crimes—I’ll mail it to you. But I’ll never speak to you again.”
A neighbor had just come home from the grocery store. He stood near his vehicle with several bags in each hand, gaping at them as Nina screamed, “So you’ve ruined Sean’s life, put an innocent man in prison and now you’re spreading your legs for his brother?”
So embarrassed she wished she could crawl under a rock somewhere, Serenity was preoccupied with looking at her neighbor and would’ve been caught unawares when Nina reached out to grab her hair or slap her or...something. But Sawyer grabbed his mother’s hand.
“You need to go home, Mom,” he said, keeping a tight hold on her wrist. “Your love for Sean has made you blind.”
She wrenched her hand away, then jabbed a finger in his chest. “Don’t you call me Mom! Don’t you ever call me Mom again, you ungrateful bastard! You sack of shit! You, you—”
Serenity yanked him back, out of the way, so she could slam the