6

Grace was sometimes afraid that Cathy might never come back.

Too many things she’d seemed fearful of since Joshua’s birth.

‘Which is not really like me,’ she’d told Magda Shrike a few months back. Magda being her former mentor and psychologist and good friend who’d relocated to San Francisco for a time, then returned a year ago. ‘Or never used to be.’

‘Events take their toll,’ Magda had said. ‘On everyone.’

‘Except the bad things last year hardly happened to me, did they?’

‘They happened to people you love, so of course they happened to you,’ Magda said. ‘You’re being way too hard on yourself, Grace.’

Which was one of the reasons Grace had decided, a while back, that it was high time she went back to doing what she was best at. Namely thinking of others, specifically her patients. The children she could be helping.

Plenty more psychologists on the beach.

True enough, but still, it was what Grace had spent years training for and many more years than that practising, and she was good at her work, she was too honest to deny that much.

Except that she’d also been having to come to terms with the fact that returning to practice would mean having to find someone to help out again; not exactly a replacement for Lucia Busseto, her former office manager – because frankly, Grace could not imagine ever again feeling able to entrust her young patients’ confidential files to any other person.

I’d be entrusting Joshua to another person.

That thought struck fear into her again now, as it always did when she and Sam discussed getting any kind of help in the house.

Which was, in itself, she thought, not entirely healthy.

‘Beeba,’ Joshua said from his high chair in the kitchen, right on cue.

‘You said it,’ Grace answered.

David and Saul – Sam’s twenty-two-year-old adoptive brother – had both offered to take care of Joshua any number of times, and Lord knew she and Sam would trust either of them to the ends of the earth. But this was not so much babysitting as a long-term lifestyle decision, one that she was going to have to come to terms with as determinedly as any other working mom.

Still, right now, Claudia was here. Had flown thousands of miles because apparently she needed her sister, and whether that was for shelter or a shoulder to cry on, or for something else entirely, then Grace knew it was time to give herself a sharp kick in the rear and simply be here for her.

Sam called at eleven thirty to tell Grace he was on a new homicide investigation.

Which meant, as she knew, there was no telling when he’d make it home.

‘We have a visitor,’ she said.

Claudia was upstairs, settling herself in Cathy’s room, and Grace had called their daughter in Sacramento a half-hour ago, and Cathy had assured her that she had no problem with that.

‘I like thinking of my room being used,’ she said.

‘Want us to take in a lodger?’ Grace asked, deliberately light.

‘I wouldn’t go that far,’ Cathy said, sounding merry, then sent them all hugs, especially Joshua who she said she was missing like crazy and could not wait to see again, all of which had made Grace feel a whole lot better.

She told Sam now about how Claudia was looking.

‘Something’s definitely not right with her.’

‘You’ve known that for a while,’ Sam said. ‘And it’s good she’s come to you.’

‘Even if it might mean she’s walked out on Daniel and the boys?’

‘Especially if that’s what’s happened,’ Sam said. ‘No one better than you to help her fix things.’

‘You think?’ Grace was wry.

‘I know,’ Sam said in his deep, rich voice.

Nice to have a husband with such faith in her.

Grace wished she could feel as certain.