Her Little Secret

They’d recently started looking for a new house in a “neighborhood with a great school.” Hope couldn’t get the hang of the word.

“He’s an older man.”

“Mrs. Bonney is a older lady.” She usually babysat when Cassie had to work late. She made cookies and crocheted afghans and loved Hope almost as much as Cassie did. “She wants to see me all the time.”

“But she lives right next door.”

“She goes away. She goes to see her little girls.”

Mrs. Bonney called her granddaughters her little girls.

Cassie searched for answers. She’d told her father to stay away. She couldn’t explain why. “Mrs. Bonney isn’t sick.”

“Is my grampa a nice man?”

A simple yes stuck in her throat. He’d blamed her for the rape. And he hadn’t loved her since.

Van, too. Van, who’d been so much her other half that excising him had left gaps in her soul. Maybe he was worse than her father, because he’d vowed to be her husband. Better or worse had broken him.

“I’m talking to you, Mommy.”

“I told you all this last night, sweetie, but you might not get to see him, since he’s in the hospital.”

“I thought we were gonna get him out of there.”

“It’s not a bad place.” Another hint she should look at her current work situation. So many of the women at the shelter went to the hospital, and their husbands were kept from seeing them. From phone calls Hope had overheard, and frankness about work that Cassie and her partners should have forgone, she might have gotten the wrong idea.

“I don’t want to go.”

“You don’t have to.” Cassie’s stomach dropped. Who’d look after Hope while she was with her father? How many people in Honesty would have to see Hope? “We’re not staying here long,” Cassie said.

“But how long?”

“A few days.”

She could hear her old friends.

When did she have that kid?

Why didn’t she tell Van?

Whose kid is that?

Van would wonder why she’d hidden Hope’s existence.

“You don’t have to explain.” Her counselor in Tecumseh had repeated that over and over in the months after Hope was born. “She’s your responsibility. You have to make a good life for her and you. And frankly, to hell with anyone else.”

Cassie’s father, practically a Biblical patriarch in her mind when she was growing up, hadn’t wanted her after she was tainted. He certainly wouldn’t want Hope. When Cassie had needed him most, he’d blamed her for the worst thing that had ever happened to her.

She’d find help for him. She closed her burning eyes tight for a second. She’d provide medical care if he needed it. She owed him nothing more.

“Where’s my gramma, Mommy?”

That question hadn’t come up last night. “I’m sorry, but you don’t have one,” Cassie said, fighting, as always, the soft memory of her mother’s hands on her face, her whispered reassurance that the dark was safe. “My mom died when I was a teenager.”

Hope, who’d been traveling since early morning and missed her nap, looked as if she might cry. “You won’t ever die, will you, Mommy?”

“Not for a long time, Hope.” According to the policeman who’d taken her statement at the shelter, she had every chance of dying pretty soon if she wasn’t more careful about taking on thugs. She’d tried to explain about the advantage of surprise. He hadn’t been impressed, and he was right. He just hadn’t come up with an alternative response, other than everyone hiding—and who could do that all the time?

“Good.” Hope smiled through a soft veil of tears in her eyes. Blessed with a sensitive heart, she’d always cried easily. “But you don’t have a mommy.”

“I’m used to that.” Who ever got used to that?

“It’s a good thing you have me.”

Cassie laughed. “Having you is the best. I love you this much.” She took her hands off the wheel long enough to spread them as far as she could. “And then some.”

“Good.” Hope tucked her baby onto her shoulder. “I’m not sleepy, Mommy.”

“I see that.”

“But I could use some mac and cheese.”

“Just let me know when. We’ll be home before you know it.” Home. She’d said it without thinking, after five years of dreading the sight of Honesty.

“We can make eggs for my grampa.”

The hospital concept proved tricky for her to grasp. Cassie glanced in the rearview, at Hope’s drooping eyelids.

With any luck, she could keep this trip an adventure for her daughter and then escape. No one who’d known Cassie before would see Hope, or ask questions.

HOPE WAS ASLEEP when Cassie parked in front of her father’s home. With her palms sweating on the steering wheel, she stared at the house, low, squat and dingy in moonlight instead of the rich blue of her memory. The ivy her father had tended so lovingly had taken over the porch and the roof, trying to pull the house down.

A woman could almost wish it had.

She glanced at Hope, hating to wake her until she saw what awaited them inside. Van had said her father would still be in the hospital, but when had Leo Wainwright Warne ever paid attention to anyone or anything other than his own sense of right and wrong?

Wallowing in a hospital bed would strike him as the height of wrong.

Cassie climbed out of the car, eased the door shut and started up the cracked driveway. Then she stopped, eyeing the house and a dark band of cloth blocking off the porch. Someone had pinned a Wet Paint sign to it. She leaned down to touch a step. Tacky. And that wasn’t all.

The ivy, cracks in the dirty cement, black tire streaks and bird droppings dotting the graying pavement. Her father hadn’t been out here with his pressure washer in a long time.

Five years couldn’t change anything this much—not unless time and neglect had lived hand in hand. Van had tried to warn her about her father. Like Hope, she just hadn’t got it.

She went around to the kitchen door. Half expecting to find it unlocked, she nonetheless lifted her key.

Only to have the door open in her face and Van come out.