He’d been lucky to find Dr. Patty Schmidt and even luckier that she allowed them to have a seven o’clock time slot on a Tuesday evening so he didn’t have to leave work to bring the girls.
In the nearly a year that they’d been seeing the therapist, he’d noticed a positive change in both his daughters. When they’d first returned to Whittler’s Creek to take care of his dad when he got sick, they were very quiet and withdrawn. Nothing he said or did could bring them out of it. Now, thanks to working with Dr. Patty, they were blossoming into chatty little girls who seemed happy and confident.
He could only hope that what they’d been through while he’d been deployed to Afghanistan would someday be a very distant memory.
* * *
THINKING THE DAY spent picking up trash was the worst, Callie changed her mind at the end of the next day after cleaning the community center. She’d been put in charge of the kitchen and had spent the entire day cleaning off the grease and grime built up on surfaces she could barely reach—the small ledge over the commercial stove, the top of the double-wide refrigerator. If it had a surface, then it needed to be cleaned. At least she knew how to make it sparkle.
Maybe she should thank her stepmother for that. Callie was always assigned kitchen cleanup and was constantly told that she hadn’t done it correctly, no matter how long she’d worked at it.
By the time Callie returned to her temporary home at Poppy’s, she was tired and filthy. She stood under the hot shower in her bathroom for too long before finally drying off and putting on fresh clothes. She really wanted to slip into bed, but she’d gotten an email from her therapist that afternoon. He wanted to set up an appointment to video chat at seven o’clock that evening.
When she checked her bedside clock, she saw it was close to six-thirty already. She might have missed dinner because of her long shower.
She hurried downstairs, determined to get something in her complaining stomach and saw that everyone was still at the table.
“Sorry I’m late.” She shoved her still-wet hair back from her face. She should have put it into a ponytail, but it would take longer to dry that way. “I really needed a shower.”
“We’re having chicken casserole,” Alexis told her. “It has carrots and peas and potatoes in it.”
“Sounds delicious,” Callie said.
“It is.” Madison put a bite of chicken on her fork and stuck it in her mouth to demonstrate.
Callie smiled and said to Poppy, “I have a seven o’clock call, so I’ll apologize now for eating and running.”
Poppy pointed to Callie’s place at the table, already set. “You do what you need to. The girls knocked on your door, but when you didn’t answer, we went ahead and started.”
“That’s good. I must have been in the shower when they knocked.” She noticed Tyler was missing from the table. “Where’s Tyler tonight?”
“He’s got some police training he does Wednesday nights, even though this town doesn’t see much criminal activity. Tyler likes his officers to be ready, so he instituted regular training sessions.”
Callie nodded and took her seat. She scooped out some of the casserole onto her plate and took a slice of the warm bread Alexis passed to her.
Callie took her first bite and whatever spices Poppy had added to the food danced on her palate. “You were right, girls, this is delicious.”
Both girls spoke at once and kept up the conversation while Callie gulped down her dinner. She looked at the bright blue clock on the wall near the table and wiped her mouth. She had about three minutes before her therapist called. “Sorry.” She jumped up from her seat and took her plate to the sink to rinse it and put it in the dishwasher. “I need to run.”
“That’s okay,” Poppy said. “We understand. Go do what you need to.”
The last thing she wanted to do was spend an hour with her anger management therapist, but she had no choice.
Her therapist called right on the dot.
“Hello, Dr. Hammond,” she said when his face appeared on her laptop screen.
“How’s it going, Callie?”
She filled him in on what she’d done since arriving in town.
“Have you seen your family yet?”
This was where she could have told him about chickening out in front of her father’s house, but she didn’t. Instead she decided to give him a tidbit that would hopefully satisfy him. “I ran into my stepsister on Monday.”
“Your stepsister?”
He looked down and Callie heard the rustling of papers.
“You’ve never mentioned a stepsister.”
“You never asked.”
Pause. “I’m asking now.” His tone was stern and slightly irritated.
Callie swallowed. “I have a stepsister and I ran into her on Monday.”
“How old is this stepsister and what’s her name?”
“Wendy is a year younger than me, so she’s twenty-eight now.”
“And the two of you lived in the same house from the time your dad remarried?”
“Yes.”
The doctor was silent for an overly long time. “Why haven’t you mentioned her before?”
Callie shrugged. “I didn’t want to talk about her.”
“Do the two of you get along?”
“No.” Callie’s answer was immediate and came out harsher than she’d intended.
“Tell me about it.”
She didn’t want to talk about Wendy. “I don’t know what you want me to tell you.” That was a lie. She knew exactly what he wanted her to say.
“Why didn’t you two get along?”
“I don’t know. She hated me the minute she walked in the front door of my house.”
Dr. Hammond wrote something down. “Did she bully you?”
Callie hesitated. “Yes. You could call what she did bullying.” With all the cyber bullying going on these days, Callie could only imagine how much worse Wendy’s treatment of her might have been if they’d had social media growing up. Texts and emails were bad enough in those days.
“What kind of things did she do?”
“Can’t we talk about something else?” Callie really didn’t want to relive her childhood with him.
“I think we’re finally making progress,” he said. “Tell me what Wendy did to you.”
Callie inhaled slowly. Her hands were at her sides, off camera, while she sat on her bedroom love seat for their session. He couldn’t see her hands fist and relax.
“What didn’t she do? She called me names, she played mean tricks on me, she spread lies about me. She even spit on me.” She’d done even worse things, but Callie didn’t want to delve into them.
“That must have been very upsetting,” the doctor said in his calm voice.
“No kidding.” She couldn’t help her sarcastic tone.
“Did you do anything to retaliate?” he asked.
“I didn’t dare. If I’d tried, she would have worked twice as hard to hurt me back.”
“What about telling