up any way she needed, when what she needed was someone who could help her decide which way to go. Same with Trey Foster: capable, but not a leader. Carol had taken the job, but she didn’t want it any more than Sela did, and now she was injured and couldn’t help.
She let herself into her house, put some wood on the low-burning fire, then wrapped herself in a quilt and plopped down on the sofa, her tired mind spinning.
The house was chilly and quiet; she’d gotten accustomed to the silence and the darkness of night, but even though the sun was shining outside she felt as if the dark and the quiet had isolated her as if she was deep in a cave.
What had happened at the Livingstons wouldn’t be an isolated case. More outsiders would be coming through; some would be friendly, some not—and it was the “not” that scared her to death. She’d been naive to think she could handle this, even temporarily. Actually she hadn’t thought it at all; Carol had. And Carol likely wouldn’t know what to do, either, because this was as far outside her experience as it was Sela’s. She couldn’t even ask her aunt about this new development, not now. Carol needed to rest, to recover, not to mention that any advice she gave while she was taking pain pills might not be well thought out.
Carol. Jim Livingston. Ted’s hostility. Being accosted by Carlette Broward. It was too much, too much all at once.
In all her life, she’d never asked for help, at least not in anything big. Never. Maybe she was too quiet, maybe she was painfully shy, but she took care of her own problems. Adam. The business. Even Carol didn’t know that early on Sela had had to take out a loan, after a few bad months at the store. She’d paid the loan back, had scraped and done without until she’d managed to pay it off early. There hadn’t been any financial troubles since then, but no one else knew how she’d initially struggled.
No one else realized how deeply the divorce had hurt her. No one saw how she continued to carry that pain. Given the chance, she wouldn’t take Adam back—no way, that ship had most definitely sailed—but that didn’t change the fact that failing at her marriage had hurt. It had hurt that she hadn’t been enough for Adam, that he’d seen her as weak, as less.
She’d never gone for counseling, never poured out her heart to Carol or to her friends. She’d borne her hurts, her fears, in silence, rather than burden others with what she considered her failings.
But this was something she couldn’t handle, and others would suffer if she did it wrong. This time, she had to ask for help. And she knew only one person who had the experience to help her with the outside threat that had come to the valley.
Chapter Fourteen
She couldn’t drive by Carol’s house without stopping to let them know where she was going. Any vehicle on the road now attracted notice. To her relief Carol was napping, and Barb and Olivia didn’t ask many questions.
She wasn’t about to walk up Cove Mountain. Ben might be willing and able to make that hike—he’d done it at least three times since the CME that she knew of, and likely more times than that—but she wasn’t. It was afternoon already, and she wanted to get up there and back before dark.
Her heart thumped hard at the prospect of seeing Ben. It had been a month since he’d sat on her porch and drank tea with her, and looked at her as if . . . well, she still wasn’t certain how he’d looked at her. At the time she’d thought he looked aroused. Then she’d thought maybe he’d been alarmed that she might make a pass at him, because how could he know she’d never made a pass at anyone in her life? And what did it say about her that she couldn’t tell the difference between arousal and alarm?
It had been weeks since he’d gifted her with not one but two solar lights . . . and then stalked away as if he didn’t even want to look at her. Was she entirely wrong about the way he’d looked at her? She didn’t think so, but then again, maybe it was just wishful thinking.
She was so fiercely attracted to him she almost couldn’t make herself go to his house.