“Sure.”
Upstairs, they parted with a smile and retreated to their separate bedrooms and baths. Hannah eyed the luxury toiletries the hotel supplied, unscrewed the cap of the shampoo, and sniffed. “Mmm.” Almost as nice as the custom products Boone supplied to the cabin.
After her shower, dressed in the white spa robe the hotel provided, Hannah dried and styled her hair, taking a little more time with it than usual. She was glad she’d brought along the makeup that Celeste Blessing had talked her into purchasing the day she’d bought her dresses for Jackson McBride’s wedding. A week ago, her skin care products were limited to the lotion she picked up at the drugstore. She hadn’t owned makeup of any kind. As Boone’s travel nanny, she wanted to make a good impression on the social worker they would be meeting for dinner shortly.
With her hair and makeup completed, she dressed in her favorite black slacks and the top she’d worn to the rehearsal party. She gave her image one last critical scan in the bathroom mirror, then picked up her handbag and exited her bedroom. Boone stood at the north-facing window gazing down at the city below. He wore jeans, boots, and a long-sleeved white sports shirt with the sleeves rolled halfway to his elbows.
He didn’t turn around when he heard her come in, but he did speak. “Being back here is surreal for me. I look the other direction, and I can see the rooftop of my old house across the river. I look in this direction, and I see the courthouse and the office space occupied by my former law firm. I spent thousands of hours in those buildings, hours that I should have spent at home. I didn’t know what was happening until it was too late. My inability to create that right balance between work and family life was one of my biggest failures. Mary died. Then I overcorrected.”
Hannah didn’t know how to respond, so she simply waited. After a long moment of silence, he asked, “What time is it?”
She glanced at her phone. “Ten minutes to five.”
“Half an hour,” he murmured. He shoved his hands into his pockets and added, “I’ve been running from that overcorrection for five years now. My folks think I left Texas because of Mary. Shoot, even Jackson and Tucker think that’s it. That’s not it. I left because of Rachel Davis, and because I was haunted by pink gel ink.”
Pink gel ink?
“I think I need to tell you about Rachel before I meet up with Sarah Winston, before I meet Trace. I need to get this off my chest. Will you listen to my story, Hannah?”
“I will.” She walked over the sofa, kicked off her sandals, and sat with her legs tucked beneath her.
His voice tight and husky with regret, he said, “It was shortly before the first anniversary of Mary’s death that Rachel’s case first came to my attention. Hannah, she was the bravest little girl I’ve ever met in my life. I won’t go into all the details. You don’t need them running around in your head, believe me. Suffice to say someone abused her horribly, and Rachel was admitted to the hospital.”
“Oh, that poor child.”
Boone continued to face the window, but he removed one hand from his pocket, lifted it, and began rubbing the back of his neck. “The people at CPS expected that I’d eventually end up on the case, so I got called in before she was discharged. I’d witnessed a lot of ugly things in my career, but seeing that pale, hollow-eyed girl lying in that hospital bed got me in a way no other case had.
“When she’d healed enough physically to be discharged, she still wasn’t talking. Her doctors didn’t want to lock her up on the psych floor, and since she had a couple of fractures, I pulled a couple of strings and got her transferred to orthopedics. We wanted to give her some time. As it happened, I was doing rehab on a shoulder injury at that time, so I spent a lot of time there myself. I started visiting her. I didn’t question her. Just sat and talked about my family, primarily. Then one evening, I came in, and she wasn’t in her bed. I found her exiting the physical therapy office with a notebook and a pen. I asked her what she was doing. She shrugged and returned to her room and ignored me for the next half hour while she watched reruns of Bewitched.”
He lapsed into silence, and at length, Hannah decided he needed encouragement to continue. She said, “I always wished I could twitch my nose like Samantha. I just don’t have the muscles for it.”
He glanced over his shoulder and met her gaze with a crooked, sad smile. Gently, she asked, “Did she write you a message?”
He turned back to the window, and his shoulders visibly slumped. “Yep. A detailed account of the abuse. It took every bit of control I possessed not to start bawling like a baby when I read it. If she hadn’t been sitting there watching, I couldn’t have held back.”
“What did you do?”
“Ah, leave it to the pretty lady to cut right to the heart of the issue.” He turned away from the window and strode across the room to the bar. He half filled a glass with tap water and tossed it back like whiskey. The glass hit the black granite countertop with clink when he set it down hard. “I promised Rachel I would get her justice. I sat beside her hospital bed and swore it. I gave her my solemn word—and then I broke it. I failed her.”
The bleakness in his expression caused her heart to twist. Hannah felt compelled to go to him to offer him a comforting touch, but his body language shouted, Stay away. So she tried to offer him comfort with words. “I haven’t known you very long, but I am confident that I know you very well. If you failed her, it was due to circumstances beyond your control.”
“Nope. See, there you’re wrong. I was in complete control of my work life. What was spinning away from me was my personal life, and I allowed it to interfere. That overcorrection I mentioned. I was distracted and made a stupid, rookie mistake, which ultimately allowed Rachel’s abuser to get off on a technicality.” Boone dragged his hands down his face, closed his eyes, and massaged his temples. “I will never forget the look of betrayal in Rachel’s eyes when I told her the news.”
“Was it a family member?”
“Yep. Age-old story. Her stepfather.”
Hannah didn’t believe Boone would have moved to Colorado without finding another way to make the stepfather pay for his sins, so she asked, “What happened to him?”
“He’s dead,” Boone snapped, his tone flat and angry.
Hannah’s eyes went wide. “Did you…?”
“No. Unfortunately. Less than a week after his case was dismissed, the sonofabitch died in his sleep. Drug overdose. Rachel didn’t get justice.”
And neither did you.
Hannah recognized that she was still missing some pieces here. What had happened to Rachel Davis? What, if anything, did Ashleigh have to do with the situation? Why had he wanted to tell her this before having dinner with the social worker?
Hannah remembered that Ashleigh’s husband had been the one who had facilitated the adoption attempt that ultimately led to Boone’s wife’s suicide. He’d also said it was a story worthy of a soap opera.
Rachel Davis. Ashleigh. The late Mary. The baby. Maybe even the social worker, Sarah. Somehow they were tied together, and that piece of the story, she believed, was what Boone found difficult to tell. She glanced at the clock. They still had twenty minutes before they needed to leave.