Most of them were school-related, like the story and picture of her from three years ago receiving an award for Teacher of the Year, and being lauded as a hero at the school shooting. He even found a photo and a wedding announcement dated earlier this same year, but he never found a mention of the actual wedding. And she’s here alone. A woman with secrets. But that wasn’t scandalous. He didn’t know a woman without them.
After that, he dug deeper and discovered that she’d graduated from college in Chicago, then went back farther to where she’d aged out of the foster system there as well, which sent him looking for clues about why she wound up there in the first place. And then his heart broke.
Abandoned baby found in an alley.
No known family.
Two applications for adoptions that never took place.
Sam took a deep breath and logged out of all the links. He was used to background checks. It was part of his job, but this was not a perp. This was a woman who’d had not one bad hand dealt to her but one after another after another, and through no fault of her own. He felt like a Peeping Tom.
He’d always thought of his girls as deprived because they were growing up without their mother, but this had given him a whole other perspective. They had him and each other. They had two sets of grandparents, and they knew of their mother and that their daddy loved them.
He felt like crying, but pinched the bridge of his nose instead, then got a beer from the fridge and slipped out onto the back porch.
The sky was clear and star-filled. The night was still and cooling off from the warmth of the day. Someone’s dog barked, and another answered in the distance as Sam took a quick sip.
Fireworks were popping off all over town. He frowned. They had a city ordinance against shooting them off in town, but it was so old that it had been ignored as far back as when he was a kid. There were a couple of army vets in town who hated fireworks and left town every Fourth of July to keep from being triggered by flashbacks, and now there was Katie McGrath in an empty house, fighting demons all alone.
She had awakened every ounce of empathy within him. The vow he’d taken to serve and protect was in the forefront of his mind, but she hadn’t asked for help. He wasn’t even sure she needed it. From what he’d read, she’d done a damn good job of taking care of herself and the children in her care.
He frowned at the sound of a car speeding through the streets somewhere to the north and then heard a siren and relaxed. His men were on the job.
He took another sip, remembering the shadows in her eyes and on her face. The face of someone living with ghosts and PTSD. How could she not?
She looked so sad. He wondered how laughter would change her face, and then let it go. Unless she was in need, he did not have the right to interfere.
***
Across the street, Katie was in a similar mood. She had showered and washed her hair and was sitting out on the back porch in the dark, letting it air-dry.
Somewhere nearby she could hear the sounds of voices and caught the scent of meat on a grill and then the sound of a speeding car, followed by sirens. Dogs were barking at each other and because of the fireworks. She empathized with the frenzy with which they were barking—trying to tell their humans that it hurt. That they were scared. Trying to find a place to hide.
Someone fired off a Roman candle nearby, and when she heard the high-pitched whistle as it shot up into the sky, her skin crawled.
Don’t run. Don’t run. It’s just fireworks.
Her hands were locked onto the arms of the old wicker chair as the Roman candle exploded into a red, white, and blue shower of sparkles. But as the sparks began to fall toward earth, they were also burning out and taking some of her anxiety with them.
Katie looked up, lulled by the beauty of the night sky. The moon was on the wane, but the stars were brilliant. She stood up and walked out into the yard, then looked up again and began looking for the North Star, then the Milky Way and the Big Dipper and the Little Dipper, remembering a foster father who’d been an astronomy enthusiast and had let all of the kids in their house look through his telescope at night. He made them call him Papa. She frowned, wondering why she remembered that now, then shrugged it off and went back inside.
She was tired, and although it wasn’t late, she double-checked all of the locks, then crawled into her sleeping bag, shifted around until she found a comfortable spot, and closed her eyes.
The faint odor of pine-scented floor cleaner still lingered. Someone started up a car next door and drove away. And as time passed, the fireworks faded.
The sounds of a city were missing, but what she heard wasn’t foreign. She knew what the sounds were and was comforted by the normalcy of ice being dumped from the ice maker and the faint hoot of an owl somewhere nearby.
But as she fell asleep, she drifted back into the darkness of bitter memories and dreamed until she woke up gasping for breath and confused about why there were no beds and why she was on the floor. It wasn’t until she got up and began turning on lights that she remembered the journey that brought her here.
Unwilling to go back to sleep for now, she went to the kitchen, got a cold bottle of pop, sat down on one of the barstools, and took a big drink.
The liquid sliding down the back of her throat made her nose burn and her eyes water, but her focus had shifted, which was her intent. Later today, her furniture would arrive. Having the familiarity of her own things around her would be comforting and settling. And when she had that behind her, she needed to call her new principal, Susan Wayne, for a face-to-face.
New town.
New school.
New life path.
After she settled down, Katie took her pop back to her sleeping bag, got her phone, and sat cross-legged within the downy coverings and started scanning social media.
She noticed Lila was beginning to post pictures of herself with her new boyfriend on Instagram and Snapchat. Seeing her friend happy made Katie happy. However, she wasn’t in the mood for the maelstrom of national news and opted not to read any of the newspapers. In this instance, ignorance was bliss. After a while, she laid her phone aside and slipped down into the sleeping bag. With every light still on in the house, she drifted back to sleep.
***
Sam was a light sleeper, and when he heard Beth crying in the night, he immediately got up to check on her.
“What’s wrong with my baby?” he said softly as he sat down on the side of her bed and scooped her up in his lap, holding her close against him.
Tears were rolling down her face.
“My arm hurts, Daddy.”
“I’m sorry,” Sam said, angry all over again that his yard guys had been that careless. He needed to give her something for pain again, but she was so little he was afraid it would make her sick. Maybe if he could get her to eat something first, he could give her one more baby aspirin. “How about we have some of that ice cream we brought home?”