“I was pissed!”
“I don’t blame you.” Drew looked around. “So Jeremiah’s not here?”
“He’s helping out at the saloon today. No school today, so Frankie’s at the house with Beans, which is his favorite place to be.”
“Him and that dog…” Drew shook her head, smiling. “Frankie’s staying at your place more and more, isn’t he?”
Willow nodded. “Yeah. We, uh, brought up the notion of taking formal custody with his grandparents. That way they could go back tobeinggrandparents.”
“How did they respond?”
“Well…they didn’t throw us out. And they didn’t say no. They’re talking to a lawyer and considering it.”
“Aw, Willow, that’s wonderful!”
“Yeah, it is.” Willow smiled fully for the first time in quite a while. She’d been walking on air about her little family taking shape; her and Jeremiah and Frankie and his horse of a dog who’d brought them all together. Everything had been perfect until this bombshell had dropped right into the middle of the clan.
Footsteps made them look up. Elena Rodriguez, the newest member of the cousin-hood, and a doctor to boot, came down the stairs. She was one of four non-blood Brands. Ethanwas adopted. Elena and Jeremiah were his half-siblings. Same Italian father, but different moms. Elena’s mom was of Mexican descent, and the combination was stunning. She looked like Sophia Loren cranked up a notch, Willow and the other she-Brands had decided.
Elena wore jeans, boots, a pretty turquoise peasant blouse, had eyes like a woodland doe’s and dark wavy hair. No white coat, but she was carrying a little black doctor’s bag that could’ve come off the set of an old western.
“Hey,” Elena said. “You okay, Willow?”
Willow was touched, but sick of being asked. Jeremiah had been asking it every time he looked at her since they’d found the cradle. And Drew, of course. Drew adored her.
She shrugged and said, “How can I be okay when I don’t know what happened to my brother?”
“How can your mom be okay when she doesn’t know what happened to her baby?” Elena asked the question gently, placing a hand on Willow’s shoulder as she did.
Will figured it was the voice she reserved for dying patients and their bereaved families, or for delivering scary diagnoses at the clinic in Quinn. Her words didn’t skim the surface of Willow’s brain like Drew’s had. They stabbed straight through the ice into the depths. “Poor Mom. All this time, never knowing,” she whispered.
“No wonder she never spoke about it,” Drew said. “I mean, it’s still the wrong call, but I can kind of understand it. Imagine her guilt—that she couldn’t hold onto him. You know?”
“Even the strongest mind can break under pressure like that,” Elena said. “Her history and files are at the clinic. It was before my time, but she consented to me looking at them. It was a serious breakdown, Willow.”
“Are there unserious breakdowns?” Willow muttered, but knew it was a dick thing to say.
“Your dad’s right to be worried.”
Willow tipped her head backward and blew a sigh to the heavens as her eyes burned. “He won’t let me in to apologize,” she said.
“I will,” Wes said.
He’d come into the kitchen to join their coffee klatch. Willow glanced at the brown bottle in her hand. Beer klatch.
“Just not today, Willow. Elena says she should sleep the rest of the night. You can talk to her in the mornin’.”
His voice had changed, Willow thought, shooting a quick glance at Drew to see if she’d noticed it, too. Drew furrowed her brow to acknowledge she had.
“I’m really sorry, Dad. I didn’t know.” Willow felt like shit for hurting her mother. In her defense, she thought, her mother had never seemed hurtable.
Her dad nodded. “I shouldn’t have kept it from you,” he said. “If I’d just told you privately, it could’ve stayed between us and maybe she wouldn’t have?—”
“No, it couldn’t.” She cut him off in a harsher tone than she’d intended. “Dad, you can’t think it waseverokay to keep this secret from any of us. This isn’t just about you and Mom. The whole family deserves to know the truth.”
“Well, thanks to you, now they do.”
“That’s not fair, Uncle Wes.” Little Drew stepped right up to Will’s tall, lean father and tipped her chin up. “We younger Brands are more like siblings than cousins. We all deserved to know that one of us was missing.”
