back in his pocket. “Where’s the fire?”
“I’m going to see Laurie.”
His cousin’s expression turned sympathetic. “Ah, I see.”
“I don’t see why you say it like that.”
“Because you never knew any way to chase after Laurie except full speed ahead.”
“And the problem with that would be...?”
“She always knows exactly what to expect. In fact, she probably counts on it.”
Harlan Patrick didn’t like what Justin was suggesting. “Are you talking in general here or are you referring to that tabloid picture?”
“It is possible she planned it,” Justin mused. “Who’d know better how to plant publicity designed to catch your attention?”
“She was trying to block the baby from view. Anybody could see that.”
“She didn’t do a very good job of it, though, did she? That baby of hers was in plain view.”
“You’re spending too much time around the criminal element. You’re starting to see conspiracies everywhere you look.”
“I’m just saying the woman had to know that you’d come hightailing it after her, the minute you saw that picture.” Justin regarded him intently. “She was expecting you, wasn’t she?”
“Of course not,” Harlan Patrick retorted, then thought of all the roadblocks Laurie had put in his path. Half of Nashville had been warned to keep her whereabouts secret. “Okay, she assumed I’d come running, but she didn’t want to be found. In fact, she did everything she could to see that I couldn’t find her.”
Justin gave him a pitying look. “Oh, please, Harlan Patrick. Who knows better than Laurie how you respond to a challenge. The more difficult she made it for you, the more determined you’d be to track her down. That’s your nature.”
“Am I that predictable?”
“You are where Laurie Jensen is concerned. Maybe you ought to think about being the one to turn your back this time. Let her do the chasing.”
The idea held a certain appeal. Unfortunately he and Laurie weren’t the only ones whose fate was at stake. “You’re forgetting about Amy Lynn.”
“No, I’m not. It is precisely because of your daughter that I want to see the two of you get it right. Let Laurie find her way back to you, Harlan Patrick. Maybe she needs a challenge in her life, too. If you don’t believe me, just look at how hard she worked to become a superstar, when she could have done nicely as a singer right here in Texas. Every time you mentioned a roadblock to her back then, she found some way to scramble over it.”
What his cousin said made a lot of sense, but Harlan Patrick pictured Amy Lynn, imagined losing her if he made the wrong decision. “I can’t turn my back on them,” he said finally. “I can’t take that chance.”
“I know it would be hard,” Justin said sympathetically. Then his eyes lit up, and he grinned. “Remember that little bird we found when we were kids, the one that had fallen out of its nest?”
“Are you sure you’re not confusing me with Dani? Your sister is the vet in the family.”
“Think back. We were maybe five or six. We nursed that little bird for a week or more, fed it what seemed like a hundred times a day.”
Slowly a dim memory began to take shape. “It was a scrawny little sparrow, wasn’t it? I kept wanting it to be a baby eagle.”
Justin’s grin spread. “You were delusional. Anyway, remember when it was strong enough and Grandpa Harlan told us it was time to set it free? You’d gotten real attached to that bird by then and didn’t want to let it go. You said you loved that little bird, and it loved you.”
It all came back to him then, the feeling of panic that had come over him at the thought of letting the tiny creature fly away. “I remember,” he said quietly.
“Do you also remember what Grandpa Harlan told us? He said when you love something, you have to let it go, that it’s only when it comes back to you of its own free will that you can truly know the meaning of love.”
The parallels to his current situation were obvious. Harlan Patrick sighed. “Quite a philosopher, our grandfather. He has a nasty habit of being right most of the time, too.”
Justin grinned. “Don’t look so downcast. Do you remember what happened with that sparrow once Grandpa Harlan convinced you to set it free? It came back and sang its little heart out for us all summer long.”
Harlan Patrick’s spirits lifted. “Yeah, it did, didn’t it?”
“And the moral of this story