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Nate stared at his son with wonder in his eyes.

Julie had to turn away. She should change Duke’s diaper and brush his teeth. She should go downstairs and sign the check-in paperwork. She should get a key to her room. She shouldn’t be thinking that Nate’s reaction to Duke made him Dadworthy.

She checked her cell phone. Seven more minutes.

She heard Nate remove Duke’s shoes. Heard him tuck Duke into the bedroll. Heard him whisper, “Sweet dreams.”

Nice. Nate had always been nice. Nice to those he worked with. Nice to those who obeyed the law. Nice. Until the day he’d asked to speak to April alone in the church vestibule. Until the week after that when he’d quit the Sacramento PD and moved away. Until he wasn’t by April’s side as she wasted away and whispered her last wishes.

How could a man who was so upstanding at work be so unreliable in his personal life?

Julie drew a labored breath.

“We need to talk.” Nate was behind her, being civil.

This wasn’t a civil situation. Julie turned on legs as stiff and unyielding as green two-by-fours. “We’ll talk tomorrow.”

He studied her the way they’d been trained at the academy, looking for signs of stress or emotional imbalance.

She forced her lips to make the journey upward toward superiority. “Tomorrow.”

After a moment, he nodded. “Breakfast. El Rosal. I’m buying.”

“We have a free breakfast here.” Needing something to do, she dug out a diaper from the bag, as if she was going to be a stellar caregiver and wake up Duke to change him.

Nada on that. The little man was hell on wheels when he woke up too soon.

His gaze turned as soft as one of Duke’s baby blankets. “It’s good to see you, Jules.”

“Don’t call me that, Landry.”

He gave her a rueful half smile, glanced at Duke one last time and then left.

She listened to his footsteps recede. She listened to the front door open and close. She listened to him drive away. Nate thought of himself as a good guy. And good guys sometimes did an about-face and came back to check on someone they thought was in need. Only when Julie was positive he’d left did she sink to the floor, resting her back against the footboard.

She texted her mother to tell her they’d arrived safely, assuring her she was all right. What a liar she’d become.

Leona appeared in the doorway, her eyes slanted with disapproval. “Are you sleeping on the floor?”

“No. I’m about to do my exercises for my back.” It wasn’t a lie if she was joking, right? “You can leave the key on the dresser with my receipt.”

“You don’t need a key.” Leona placed a handwritten receipt on the dresser with Julie’s credit card. “We don’t have locks.” She closed the door behind her.

“No key,” Julie murmured. No privacy. No way to lock Duke in here with her to prevent him wandering if he awoke at midnight. No pain killers. No revenge. No signed custody agreement. What a bust of a day.

Julie unbuttoned her shirt, drawing it carefully over her injured shoulder. Blood trickled from her collarbone. She peeled the bandage off, opened the diaper and shoved it under her bra strap.

She’d sit a few more minutes to gather her strength. And then she’d take her med kit into the bathroom, being careful not to bleed all over those white tiles.

Just a few more minutes...

CHAPTER FOUR (#u93cfa53e-af90-59b1-9de3-bf5d9987b2bd)

AFTER LEAVING THE BED-AND-BREAKFAST, Nate drove around town, ostensibly to make his nightly rounds.

But it was more than worry for the town that kept him from bed. His mind was as jumbled as a box of well-used Scrabble tiles. As if being blindsided by Doris wasn’t bad enough...

I’m a father.

And April was dead. He’d need to visit her grave and pay his respects, maybe make a donation to a cancer-related charity.

I’m a father.

And Julie looked like she’d been run over by a bus. He’d need to contact a few of their mutual friends on the force and find out how bad her cancer was. He didn’t want to repeat the mistake he’d made with April. But that mistake hadn’t been one-sided. April had had a lot to say on their wedding day and she’d known...

I’m a father.

As were many of his friends in Harmony Valley. But unlike them, he didn’t know his son’s middle name. He didn’t know what he’d looked like as a baby. He didn’t even know his son’s birth date. Birthdays meant a lot to kids. They tended to remember birthdays as they got older.

Nate had been given a gun for his eighth birthday. It was a wreck of a weapon. The stock was duct-taped. The barrel scraped and the sight bent forward as if someone had used it for a cane. But it was a real rifle, not a BB gun like Matthew Freitas had gotten for his eighth birthday.

“Time you start acting like a man,” his father had said in a voice that boomed in their small kitchen. He’d stared at his wife making pancakes for Nate’s birthday breakfast with an arrogant grin. “Duck-hunting season is coming up.”

Nate longed to go duck hunting. They lived in Willows, California, where everyone hunted. It was practically a law.

“Bring your gun. Let’s go shoot.” There was a sly note to Dad’s voice that Nate didn’t understand.

Not that he cared. He’d played shooting video games at Tony Arno’s house down the block. Nate was a good shot. Wait until he showed Dad!

“No.” Mom sounded a little panicked, like she did when she didn’t have dinner ready and Dad pulled into the driveway. She came to stand behind Nate, drawing him to her with fingers that dug through to bone.

His little sister’s eyes were big. She tugged at the skirt of her Sunday school dress.

Nate bet Molly was jealous. She never got to do anything with Dad.

But Nate was eight. He was a man now. That meant Dad would take him hunting. There’d be no more cleaning toilets for Nate. No more dishes. No more dusting. No more butt-stinging whuppings.

Dad glowered at the women in the household. “The boy’s coming with me.”

Nate had naively stepped forward.

Someone stepped into the beam of Nate’s headlights and then leaped back.

A slender African American man stood on the sidewalk in a bathrobe, shuffling his bunny-slippered feet.

Nate slammed on his brakes. The truck shuddered to a halt, but Nate’s limbs continued to quake. He rammed the truck in Park and jumped out, bellowing, “Terrance! What are you doing out here?”

“Evening, Nate.” The tall, elderly man shoved his hands into his burgundy terry-cloth pockets. “You didn’t have to stop so...so quickly.”