Karen Rose - Their Child?

Lori couldn’t let her go on blaming herself. “You haven’t messed anything up. I have.”

Lena grabbed a tissue from the box on the tray. “Huh?” She honked into the tissue. “Come on. I was the one who had the idea for us to switch on prom night. And I’m the one who blew it and told Tucker before you had a chance to tell him yourself. So it is my—”

Lori reached out and gently brushed her sister’s arm. “Just believe me. It’s not your fault.”

“I don’t see how you can say that.”

“I know you don’t. But you will.”

Lena frowned. “Great. What you’re tellin’ me is that you’re not going to explain to me what the heck is going on, right?”

“I can’t. Not right now. I have to talk to Tucker first. But as soon as I do, I’ll tell you everything, I promise.”

“I just don’t understand.”

“You will. Right now, though, the main thing you need to know is that you didn’t do anything wrong. What’s wrong here is all my doing.”

“But I don’t…” Lena stopped in midsentence. Lori watched her sister’s face and saw the exact moment when Lena caught on. “Or maybe I do,” Lena said softly. “Prom night. You and Tucker…”

Lori gulped and nodded, thinking, So much for my chance to talk it over with Tucker first.

“You two didn’t really go out for breakfast, did you?”

No more lies, Lori silently vowed. Never again will a lie pass my lips. She didn’t let her gaze waver. “No. We didn’t.”

“And that guy, the next night. The one we all thought was Brody’s father…there was no guy, was there?” Lori shook her head. Lena said, softly, “Wow.”

Lori said, “I really messed up.”

And Lena nodded. “Well, yeah. You really did.”

Tucker paused with his hand raised to ring the bell. He stared at that heavy oak front door and remembered how he’d pounded on it that afternoon eleven years ago.

Lena had opened it and sent him away. He’d left not knowing that it wasn’t even Lena he’d come to see.

Low in-ground lanterns shone from the flower beds. The porch light, a brass and beveled-glass creation suspended from a chain, glowed above his head. But as far as he could see, there were no lights on inside. If he rang the bell, he’d be getting them out of their beds.

So be it. He punched the doorbell and heard the chimes echo in the shadows beyond the door.

Then he waited. It didn’t take long. Heck, in a plaid robe, his feet stuck in a pair of run-down moccasins, pulled open the door. At the sight of Tucker, his big, jowly face went slack. “Lori? Is she—?”

Tucker rushed to reassure the older man. “She’s fine. Resting comfortably, they said. Lena’s with her. I came to…let you know. That she’s doing well…” Damn, that sounded lame.

But why wouldn’t it? It was lame. Heck had heard the news already from Dr. Zastrow, hours ago, before he and Enid and Brody left the hospital.

Enid, wearing a long pink robe, her hair smashed flat on one side, appeared at the head of the stairs. “Heck? Who is it?”

“It’s Tucker.” The big man turned in the doorway and spoke to his wife. “He’s come to tell us that Lori’s doing just fine.”

“Tucker!” Enid hurried down the stairs. “Come in, come in. Heck, honey, where are your manners?”

They led him to the kitchen and Enid brewed a quick pot of coffee. She poured him a mugful and fussed over him, offering eggs and toast if he wanted them. He declined, with thanks.

He didn’t know what he’d expected, exactly. Maybe at least a little suspicion—on Heck’s part, anyway. There was no real reason for Tucker to be showing up at their house well after midnight, rousing them from bed to tell them what they already knew.

But Heck and Enid didn’t seem to care in the least that he really didn’t need to be there, that the news he had for them wasn’t news at all. And when he asked to see Brody, Enid popped right up and pushed in her chair. “Oh, he’ll be so pleased. He was asking about you, just before he went to bed.”

Tucker heard himself muttering, “Uh. He was?”

“Well, of course. You made quite an impression on him.”

“I did?”

Heck chuckled. “Bound to impress a boy, when you save his life—and his mother’s, too.”

Enid added, looking misty-eyed, “Impresses a boy’s grandparents, as well.”

Heck said, “Damn, man. Believe it. You’re almost as popular with Brody right now as that ugly mutt of yours.”

Enid’s misty smile widened. “You come on, now. This way…”

Tucker set down his coffee mug and fell in step behind her. She led him out of the kitchen, into the central hall and up the stairs, where she stopped at the first door on the right. She tapped lightly. They waited. No sound came from inside.

Enid put her finger to her lips, grasped the door handle and slowly pushed the door inward.

Light from the hallway poured into the room, a wedge of brightness across the single bed opposite where they stood. Brody was sound asleep, sprawled on his back, the covers kicked away.

He wore blue short-sleeved Bart Simpson pajamas. That persistent cowlick Tucker had noticed the afternoon before stuck up against the pillow—the cowlick so much like the one Tucker himself had always fought to tame. The light accentuated the shadow that defined the cleft in his chin—the cleft like the one Tucker saw every morning when he looked in the mirror to shave.

And not only the cowlick and the cleft chin. There was also the shape of his face and the curve of his mouth when he smiled.

Mine, Tucker thought.

There was no doubt about it. He should have seen it before. It really was damned amazing, how the truth had been right there in front of him for two weeks now, and he’d never seen it. He’d seen only what he expected to see.

Like Lena, that long-ago night…

He’d expected to see Lena that night. Lena, a vision in pink, whirling in his arms. Lena, nervous and so sweet, so achingly eager, naked beneath him, her soft lips forming his name.

Even that night, his senses had rebelled. He’d noticed—how different she seemed; her eyes softer, and her voice, too. Gentler, quieter; in a strange way, more feminine. That night, she wasn’t the Lena he knew.

Because she wasn’t Lena at all.

Silently, Enid pulled the door shut. She whispered, “Sorry. I hate to wake him…”

“It’s all right,” said Tucker. He’d seen what he needed to see.

The story of the twister that brought down the clubhouse on top of three hundred wedding guests made the first page of the Abilene News-Reporter. It also made the Dallas Morning News, though not the front page. Some eager newshound had gotten a great shot of the collapsed clubhouse under a lowering sky, with a bedraggled little knot of drenched wedding guests surveying the ruin. The picture was picked up by the wire services and popped up in papers all over the country. The story—a sound-bitesize version of it—even made it onto CNN and MSNBC.

Sunday afternoon, Dr. Zastrow released Lori into the loving care of her parents. Once she’d hugged her son and let her mother fuss over her for a while, Lori retreated to her room and called the Double T.

Miranda answered and asked her to please wait a moment.

Lori said, “Sure,” and knew, beyond the last fading shadow of a very scary doubt, that Tucker would refuse to talk to her.

Then he picked up the phone. “Lori. Hello.” And she didn’t know which was worse: if he’d refused to talk to her at all, or his voice as it sounded now. Distant. Cool. Dangerously polite. “How are you feeling?”