Nick cursed the fact he didn’t have a house key. Maybe there was one still hidden where his mother had always left it. It was so bittersweet to come home but not find her here for the first time in his life.
He strode behind the house and heard Beamer follow him to the back door. He had hoped Tara, his sister’s best friend and Claire’s temporary guardian, would be home. He should have called her from the Denver airport, but at the last minute he and Jim had flown standby from Dulles in D.C., and then he thought it would be fun to surprise them.
Nick had met the beautiful, redheaded Tara here at the house a couple of years ago. He couldn’t quite recall when, but he could recall her. It was before he’d signed the contract with the army to train dogs to sniff out the cave-clinging Taliban, including Bin Laden, who had a reward of a cool fifty million dollars on his head. They’d located a lot of the enemy but not the man himself, a small regret compared to his tragic failure while he was there.
Trying to deep-six that memory, Nick glimpsed a photo of Tara and Claire together, all dressed up for some event. The picture was on the coffee table, in great danger of being swept off by Beamer’s tail. The photo reminded him of Tara’s lavish wedding to big money. She still looked like how he’d picture an old-fashioned Irish lass though, not someone on the society pages of the paper. She was a natural, windblown-looking beauty with red hair to her shoulders. He only really knew her through a couple of phone calls and their sporadic e-mails, all dealing with Claire. He’d been stationed so far out in the boonies with the Delta boys that he hadn’t even known Clay had murdered Alexis until she’d been buried for over a week. Anyway, if he’d been here, he probably would have tracked Clay down and then strangled his former brother-in-law with his bare hands.
This homecoming was also tough because Nick had been incommunicado with a Delta chalk squad when the stroke killed his mother. Tara and some distant relatives had taken care of the arrangements, as well as of little Claire. He owed Tara Kinsale big-time.
He checked for the house key under the flower crock where his parents had always kept it. Negative. With walls still between them, he and Beamer raced for the front of the house again. He’d just bivouac on the front deck, waiting for Claire and Tara to show. But if he didn’t calm Beamer down, the high-ceilinged great room was going to look like a bomb blew up in it. He shuddered at that image—that memory.
“Good dog,” he shouted through the window. Time to see if Beamer still knew who the senior partner was, the alpha pack dog, after their time apart. If Beamer obeyed him, he’d take that as a sign that Claire would happily do whatever he decided was best. After all, how hard could it be to take care of a young girl when he’d trained dogs and given orders to the Delta boys, no less.
“Sit,” Nick commanded solemnly. “Beamer, sit. Beamer, quiet.”
Tears blurred Nick’s vision of the big, wide-eyed, panting dog as he immediately sat silent with his tail thumping the floor like a pendulum.
Tara wished she’d been able to find a female doctor who was taking new patients. She really did miss Jen. They had met at a social event years ago and had been friends before they’d been patient and physician. But Jen could never understand why Tara didn’t gladly toe Laird’s line. Jen hadn’t brought it up, but Tara suspected she probably blamed Tara for their divorce, despite the fact that Laird had left her. Though Tara was grateful to be out of a bad marriage, it did hurt that Laird had deserted her in her hour of need. It was so strange to be married to him, and then, when she awoke from the coma—which felt like the very next day to her, though it was almost an entire year—to be divorced and not to have any contact with him. A blessing, in one way, but a curse to her psyche, too, one that counseling had not quite erased.
“A dream catch,” Jen had called Laird with a sigh the first time she’d laid eyes on him. “Wish I’d been the one doing some social work with patients at the Lohan Mountain Manor Clinic. You sure were lucky, running into the eligible fair-haired son there.”
Jen and Tara had talked via cell phone several times while Tara was rebuilding her life, but she knew Jen was busy starting over, too. Lately, they spoke less and less. It seemed, at least on Jen’s part, they had little in common now.
Dr. Gordon Holbrook, Tara’s new G.P., came into the examining room and said cheerily, “Good afternoon, Tara.” He was fifty-something, with gray etching his temples and prominent crow’s-feet and worry lines on his pleasant face. He sat down to chat about how she’d been feeling since waking from the coma and to go over the extensive medical records he’d received from Jen and from the Lohan Clinic, where she’d spent the last nine and a half months of her coma, then two months of rehab and counseling.
In short, Dr. Holbrook seemed to have a good bedside—or examination tableside—manner. He was thoughtful enough to call Pamela back into the room when he began the cervical exam and pap test, so Tara would feel more at ease.
Tara was still tense, but responded to his small talk about how the property values were skyrocketing in the area. He had friends who lived on Shadow Mountain Road, but not as high up as her. She didn’t know them. She explained that she’d only lived in the area since her foster child’s grandmother had died, because she didn’t want to uproot Claire again. Their nearest neighbors lived about a football field away.
When he was done, Dr. Holbrook slid the stirrups back under the table, covered her legs with a light blanket and had her sit up. He told Pamela she could step out. He had stopped the light talk; in fact, he stopped talking at all as he went to her folder. He scanned it again, frowning. With all Tara had been through after the coma, she could tell when bad news was coming. She gripped her hands tightly together.
“What is it, Doctor? Is something wrong?”
“No, simply an incomplete record here—by far. There is nothing I see here about your pregnancy or your delivery of a baby. Was the child lost or perhaps adopted?”
Her insides cartwheeled, then she actually snorted a little laugh of surprise. His question didn’t give her a lot of faith in him now. “That’s because I’ve never had a baby.”
“I do understand,” he said, “that you might have private reasons for not wanting to admit to a pregnancy or having borne a child. But I’m not here to judge you in any way.”
“Doctor, I have not had a child. Besides, I was on birth control pills the entire two years I was married. What gives you the idea I was even pregnant?”
“Several key indicators,” he said. Sitting, still frowning, he leaned slightly toward her. Her pulse picked up and her stomach cramped. “Tara, you have all the signs of having had a pregnancy and a vaginal delivery.”
“Oh, you mean the stretch marks on the sides of my stomach. Those are from lying comatose so long, I think, even though they moved and massaged me and—”
“I didn’t even notice those. There are telltale indicators of a pregnancy that must have gone at least nearly full-term.”
“What? Doctor, there is no way. I said I was on birth control pills and—”
“There have been instances of pregnancies while someone is on the Pill. One missed pill, or even counterfeit ones coming in from China that have found their way into reputable drugstores or other suppliers.”
“It’s still impossible. You’ve read my record. That’s all there is!”
“Tara, your vagina is relaxed, not tight.”
“I was unconscious for almost a year! Every part of me was relaxed!” She kept shaking her head. This was ridiculous—impossible. She didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. She even felt insulted. But when he’d said the words vaginal delivery, for some reason, she’d felt the earth shake.
“Also,” he went on, “your cervix is open about one centimeter, and it doesn’t have the tip-of-a-nose-with-dimple appearance of a woman who has never been pregnant and delivered.