Mercy says something else, but I don’t hear it, because all I can focus on is the panic rolling off Hope in unrelenting waves—and the desperate need in my chest to make her problems my problems. To make sure she doesn’t have any problems, ever again.
But that’s not reality.
Reality is that we’re strangers, and I have no idea what kind of trouble she’s mixed up in. I also know exactly what kind of extra trouble would roll her way, inevitably, because of proximity to us. This has disaster written all over it.
“Mommy…”
She turns around, kneeling to give her daughter—Bellamy—her attention.
“She had a panic attack this morning,” Mercy says quietly, for my ears only. I guess she’s decidedI get to know more, after all. “She’s running on fumes and she’s scared of something specific, and I don’t know what it is, but I know a woman in trouble when I see one.”
I do too.
That’s the problem.
“Maybe we can put her up in the motel in town. If she’s running on fumes, she shouldn’t have to work,” I try to reason. “I can cover the costs.”
“Zane,” my mother says, cutting our private conversation off. “Hope and Bellamy are going to stay with us for a few days. Since Dax is gone, they’ll have the whole second floor to themselves. Can you take Bellamy’s car seat and their bag up to the house?”
“Luna, I think?—”
She raises her eyebrow, cutting me off.
After pushing her to have help with the harvest, I can’t tell herthishelp isn’t acceptable.
“Sure,” I hear myself say instead of the curtnoI really want to snarl out.
In the back of Mercy’s car, I find the car seat and a reusable grocery store bag with some clothes in it. There’s nothing to the weight of it, and that’s a giant red flag.
Hope has nothing to her name. And if she’s running, someone’s bound to chase her.
In the house, I call my brother.
Cash picks up on the second ring. “Hey there, sunshine.”
“You didn’t think to give me a heads up about sending strangers to the ranch?”
“Oh, Mercy’s new friends?”
“Yes, Mercy’s new friends.” The words catch in my throat like a burr.
“What’s the problem? You were the one crying about the kale yesterday.”
“I was telling you that Luna needed help fromus. Not so you could install a woman and child on the property without telling me.”
“Mercy vouched for her.”
“Mercy met her yesterday.” I pinch the bridge of my nose. “You don’t know anything about this woman. You don’t know where she came from, you don’t know what she’s running from, you don’t know if there’s somebody behind her?—”
“If someone’s looking for her, they’ll only get as far as the garage, and I’m not telling them she’s on the ranch. Which makes her safer with you than anywhere else, don’t it?”
“I don’t want to be her protector.” I sound desperate to my own ear.
Cash laughs. Almost like he knows I do want to protect her. But protecting women has always been our weakness. It sent him to jail, didn’t it? But he clearly doesn’t see this as the problem I do. “Did you tell her to get the hell off your land?”
“I can’t fucking do that.”
“So you’re pissed because I made a decision that you would have made yourself anyway. You just wanted to be the one who made it.”
