“We’ll listen,” Grace promised.
“We gotta tell,” Josh said, regarding his big brother stubbornly. “Maybe they’ll let us stay.”
“I say we don’t,” Jamie insisted. “They’re grown-ups. They’ll just make us go back. They’ll say they gotta, because it’s the law or something. You want to be separated again, like last time?”
He seemed unaware of just how revealing his question was. Michael was uncomfortably aware of an ache somewhere in the region of his heart. These two were getting to him, no doubt about it. As for Grace, they’d clearly already stolen her heart. She was regarding them sympathetically.
“You were in foster care, weren’t you?” she guessed. “And not together?”
“Uh-huh,” Josh said, shooting a defiant look at his brother. “Nobody would take both of us last time or the time before that. They said we were too much trouble when we were together.”
“I’m old enough to look out for my own kid brother,” Jamie said, regarding them both with his usual belligerence. “We’ll be okay. You don’t have to do nothin’. Soon as we eat, we’ll go.”
“Go where?” Michael asked, feeling as if the kids had sucker punched him. He tried to imagine being separated from Dylan, Jeb and Tyler when they’d been the ages of these boys. He couldn’t. They were bound together by a shared history, by family and by the kind of fierce love and loyalty that only siblings felt despite whatever rivalries existed.
He focused his attention on Jamie, since he was clearly the leader. Josh would trustingly go along with whatever his big brother wanted. “How old are you?”
“Sixteen,” Jamie said, drawing a shocked look from his brother.
“I’d guess thirteen, tops,” Michael said, turning to gauge Josh’s reaction, rather than Jamie’s. The boy gave him a subtle but unmistakable nod. “How about you, Josh? Eight? Nine?”
“Eight,” Josh admitted readily. He was apparently eager to provide any information that might persuade Michael and Grace to keep the two of them at the ranch. “Last week. That’s when Jamie came for me, on my birthday. We’ve always been together on our birthdays, no matter what. We promised.”
“And that’s a very good promise to try to keep,” Grace said. “Families should stick together whenever they can.”
As she said it, she kept her gaze locked on Michael. He got the message. There were now evidently three against one in the room should he decide to fight for an immediate call to the proper authorities. Grace wasn’t going to turn these two over to anybody who would separate them again, though how she hoped to avoid it was beyond him. There were probably a zillion rules about how to handle this, and he’d brought her here precisely because she knew them. Now she was showing every indication that she might just ignore all zillion of them. For the moment, however, it had to be her call. She was the expert.
“How long have you been in foster care?” she asked, apparently inferring from Michael’s silence that he was willing to withhold judgment until all the facts were in.
“Since Josh was four,” Jamie finally confessed. “We were together in the first place, but then they got mad at me, ’cause I wouldn’t follow all their stupid rules, so I got sent away to another family. They kept Josh till he ran away to find me. When they dragged him back, he cried and cried, till he made himself sick. Then they said they couldn’t cope with him either.”
Michael swallowed hard at the image of a little boy sobbing his heart out for his big brother. Instead of being treated with compassion, he’d been sent away. What kind of monsters did that to a child? He glanced at Grace and thought he detected tears in her eyes.
“How many places have you been since then?” she asked gently.
“Four,” Jamie said without emotion. “Josh has been in three.”
“Because you keep running away to be together?” Grace concluded.
“Uh-huh.”
“What happened to your parents?”
“We don’t got any,” Jamie said flatly. His sharp gaze dared his brother to contradict him.
Even so, Josh couldn’t hide his shock at the reply. “That’s not true,” he protested, fighting tears. “We got a mom. You know we do.”
“For all the good it does. She’s been in rehab or jail as far back as I can remember,” Jamie said angrily. “What good is a mom like that?”
“I’m sure she loves you both very much, despite whatever problems she has,” Grace said. “Sometimes things just get to be overwhelming and people make mistakes.”
“Yeah, like turning her back on her own kids,” Jamie said with resentment. “Some mistake.”
Michael was inclined to agree with him, but he kept silent. This was Grace’s show. She no doubt knew what to say under very complicated circumstances like this. He didn’t have a clue. He just knew he wanted to crack some adult heads together. The vehemence of his response surprised him. Grace was the champion of the underdog, not him. He’d wanted to distance himself from this situation, not get drawn more deeply into it. But with every word Jamie and Josh spoke, he could feel his defenses crumbling.
“Where are you from—I mean originally, back when you lived with your mom?” Grace asked the boys.
The question surprised him. He’d just assumed the boys had to be from someplace nearby. How else would they have wound up in Trish and Hardy’s barn? Realistically, though, how many foster homes were there likely to be around Los Piños? How much need for them would there be in a town this size, anyway?
“We were born in San Antonio,” Jamie said. “But we moved around a lot, even before Mom ditched us. I can’t even remember all the places. She liked big cities best because it was easier to get…” He shrugged. “You know…stuff.”
Michael was very much afraid he did know. He held back a sigh.
“And your last foster home?” Grace asked. “Was it near here?”
The boy shook his head. “Not really. When I got Josh, I figured this time we’d better get far away so they could never find us. I figured they’d just give up after a couple of days. It’s not as if anybody really cares where we are. We’ve been hitching rides for a while now. Like a week, maybe.”
“Yeah,” Josh said. “We must have gone about a thousand miles.”
“It’s only a couple of hundred, doofus,” Jamie said.
“Well, it seems like a lot. We didn’t get a lot of rides, so we had to walk and walk. Jamie wouldn’t get in a car with just anybody. He said we could only get in pickups where we could ride in the back.”
Michael listened, horrified. He saw the same sense of dismay on Grace’s face. Clearly, they both knew all too well what might have happened to two small boys on the road alone. Obviously Jamie, at his age and with his street smarts, understood the dangers as well, but it was also clear that he thought those were preferable to another bad foster care experience or another separation.
“We told the truth,” Jamie said, looking from Grace to Michael and back again. “You gonna let us stay?” He didn’t sound especially hopeful. His expression suggested he was ready to run at the first hint that Michael and Grace might not agree to let them stick around.
“Why don’t you boys go and check on the feed for the horses?” Michael suggested. “Grace and I need to talk things over and decide what’s best.” He scowled at Jamie. “And don’t get any ideas about taking off while we do, okay? We’ll work this out. I promise.”
He meant that promise more than he’d ever meant anything in his life.
Unfortunately,