Читать книгу Lone Star Redemption - Colleen Thompson - Страница 10

Prologue

August 1st

If she couldn’t have her son back, was peace too much to ask?

The question reverberated through sixty-eight-year-old Nancy Rayford’s throbbing skull with an intensity untouched by the powerful prescriptions she had taken. Still, the knocking went on, a pounding at her front door. What time was it, anyway? How long since she’d drifted off?

Tossing aside the light throw she’d used as a blanket, she pushed herself up off the soft cushions of a leather sofa before blinking at the television. There, the muted figure of some late-night comedian clowned before his silent audience. All of them laughing up a storm, as though her sweetest boy had not been reduced to ashes in a small urn just two weeks before.

Not a boy; a man, she reminded herself, Ian and his brother both. But she’d never known either one as a grown adult, as a soldier, thanks to her husband’s scorched-earth approach to fatherhood. Now he was gone, as well, leaving her alone here, or as alone as an aging widow could get surrounded by thousands of acres of drought-plagued range and thirsty cattle.

The pounding started again, adding a desperate edge to the insistent rhythm. It sliced through her drugged reality, reaching a part of her that understood there must be something very wrong. Shaking overtook her at the suspicion that she would find another pair of uniformed officers at her front door, somber military personnel assigned to tell her that her surviving firstborn son, her Zach, was gone, too.

With a cry of pain, she lurched through the empty house, her shaking hand reaching for the door before she could wonder if it might be unsafe to do so. Because he was all she had left; if he’d been taken from her now, too—

With her heart pounding in her throat and the world careening wildly around her, she unlocked the door and flung it open so hard that it banged against the entry wall. Staring into the dark August night, she begged the same God who’d failed at every turn to heed her prayers that it not be the news she most feared. Please don’t take him, too.

But tonight’s visitor wore faded jeans and a black T-shirt rather than the dreaded uniform. She was a gaunt and pale young woman, with eyes shadowed by exhaustion and arms that trembled with the weight of the small child she carried. The sleeping girl of three—or was it four?—years, wrapped in a blanket, her tawny hair a matted mess.

“I can’t do this anymore,” the young woman told her, her eyes shimmering with tears. “I just can’t. I need your help, please, Nancy. C-can you take her?”

Drained from days of headaches and weak from dehydration, Nancy felt a jolt of pure energy restore her. Her long trance shattered, and a new sense of purpose moved her forward. She raised thin arms to lift the burden from the taller woman’s arms, to cuddle the child close to her breast.

Rather than weighing her down, the little girl’s weight made Nancy feel lighter than she had since her husband’s death, six months earlier, lighter and younger than she had in decades. And when she looked down into the precious face, so smooth and unblemished and impossibly perfect, the knowledge coursed through her, a swift river of current telling her that this was no accident at all.

This was, instead, a miracle, a reason to go on.