make me believe I couldn’t survive on my own,” she whispered. “I bet it was so that she could sell the company instead of passing it down to me like Grandmother said she was to do.”
She stood as still as possible and listened to him play. Out there in the raw earth, where everything struggled for a place, Josh’s music was the most beautiful she’d ever heard. He finally put the instrument back in his pocket, picked up his sketch pad, and began to draw. No matter how hard she squinted, she couldn’t see what he was working on. She took a step forward, but that was as far as her newly found strength would allow her to go. Finally, she turned around and started back toward the tiny dots that were the trailers in the far distance.
When that antsy feeling that someone was close by came over Josh, he put his harmonica away and picked up his sketch pad. A coyote was probably hiding in the copse of young scrub oak trees about fifty yards behind him and trying to decide whether to have Josh for a midmorning snack since he couldn’t find a rabbit. Every hair on Josh’s neck stood up until he glanced up at the rearview mirror of his four-wheeler, which was parked close to him, and saw that it was a dark-haired woman. What would some stranger be doing out here on his land? He’d told at least a dozen developers that he wasn’t interested in selling even one acre of what he owned. Dealing with those people made him nervous, but he could and would say no again.
He squinted until his eyes were nothing but slits before he finally figured out that it was Sophie’s friend Emma. From what Sophie had said, she was an introvert like he was, but he didn’t know much more than that. His mother, a psychologist, and his father, a physician, had had test after neuropsych test run on him from the time he was four years old. The final prognosis was that he was simply one of those smart people who did not adapt to society. His only niche in life seemed to be the pictures that he loved to draw.
That day he was working on a picture of a hawk coming in for a landing. Dark clouds hovered behind the bird with its widespread wings, but there in the pupils of his eyes were the reflections of a sunrise.
Do your homework. Drawing pictures is never going to get you anywhere. His father’s big, booming voice was so loud that he dropped his pen in the dirt and covered his ears.
He was supposed to be their wonder child, but what they got was a kid who didn’t talk until he was four years old, who hated school and wound up liking to spend time with his grandfather and his grandfather’s old buddy Harry more than anything other than drawing pictures.
“Who would have thought that one day my grandfather’s best friend would leave me a fortune? His will said that my dad didn’t need his money since he and my mom were making their own millions. Dad was furious, but he couldn’t do anything about it.” Josh talked to himself as he picked up his pen and gathered up his supplies to push all the internal voices away. “Now I don’t have to listen to my father yell at me.” He got on the four-wheeler and started back to his trailer to make himself a sandwich for lunch. When he got closer, he could see Emma going up the stairs to the back porch of Sophie’s trailer.
Sophie waved at Emma and then went inside to get two longneck bottles of beer. By the time she got back, Emma was sitting on the porch. She set one beer down on the wide porch rail next to Emma and took a long drink from the bottle in her hands.
“How was your walk?” Sophie asked.
“Amazing,” Emma answered. “Did you ever watch Big Bang Theory?”
“Did you? I thought that Victoria . . .” Sophie paused to regroup.
“Sometimes when she was gone, Daddy and I would watch it together in his study. That was one room she didn’t have control over,” Emma said. “Have you seen it?”
“I have all twelve seasons of it on discs,” Sophie said. “I brought those and Castle with me. We don’t get many television stations out here. Why are you asking?”
“Leonard Hofstadter, a character in that show, reminds me