Katie sat in the blackness of her private room and tried to overcome her surprise. Her heart was still racing. Robert. Robert. Robert. She’d tried to excuse herself from Lucille’s office, where she’d taken the call, without sounding as stunned as she was.
“What was that all about?” Lucille had asked.
Katie turned her face away. Lucille could read her expressions too easily. “It was an old friend,” she murmured.
Lucille must have read her body language in spite of her hidden face. Her coworker laughed low and said, “Riiight.”
Katie sat on the edge of her bed and hugged herself. Dread brought the faceless woman with the fiery hair to mind. She hadn’t prepared Robert for what he would find on this mountaintop. Should she have told him about her scars, her blindness? Should she have told him that she was not the same person he remembered?
He might turn away when he saw her, though Katie honestly didn’t believe he'd do that unless the last fifteen years had worked some tragic change in his heart. If they had, she believed she would love him anyway.
Love him still. Yes. She did.
Katie started praying. She prayed until the flaming head of her nightmares finally began to recede.
She considered the likelihood that Robert would be married after all this time.
She swallowed the pain of that possibility. If he was, that would be for the best. Because when he found out the truth about her—if he ever found it out—he would vanish from her life forever.
Robert directed his truck up the narrow mountain road that led to the Desert Hope House. He wasn't sure how to identify the emotion that stirred in the pit of his stomach and was less sure that he wanted to. After fifteen years spent capturing and caging the emotions of his loss, the prospect of reuniting with someone who shared his experience threatened the security he had constructed for himself.
And opened up the possibility that he could finally kill the untamed beast.
“The people at All Angles are pretty interested in your friend,” Brian said.
Robert had tried to find a way to ship Brian back to Tucson after his call to Katie, but the journalist smelled a story with money behind it. So, apparently, did someone else.
“Katie Morgon is becoming well known in public service circles. Some two hundred fifty women have completed her program in the last ten years.” Brian read from his wireless device. “Seventy-three percent are still sober and hold paying jobs after five years. That’s pretty high.”
Robert’s truck hit a pothole and jarred the young reporter out of his seat. Sixteen miles into the mountains outside of Santa Fe, the halfway house would be remote enough to discourage wannabe runaways, but close enough to town to ease former addicts back into the real world by degrees. It was a detail Katie would have thought through.
“She’s won four humanitarian and public service awards in New Mexico in the past two years. People who are like her—people like the Mother Teresas and Father Flanagans of the world—fame comes to them whether they want it or not. True goodness is rare enough these days that people will notice it.”
“Katie was always like that.”
“Award winning?”
“Good.”
“She started working at the house thirteen years ago.” Brian whistled. “You think she would have been in any condition to do something like that then?”
“What condition?” Robert didn’t mean to be accusing, but really, if Brian asked Katie questions like that, Robert would boot him off the mountaintop himself.
Brian looked away and cleared his throat. “She took over the program when the director died in an auto accident. She was only twenty-one.”
She’d be thirty-two now. Robert wondered what Katie looked like today, if he would recognize her. If he passed her on the street, would he turn away? The information Mrs. Whitecloud had provided did not offer gruesome details about the extent of her burns. It did say, though, that she had been in and out of the hospital regularly over many years. Robert could only assume what for. Skin grafts. Infections. Pneumonia, which was so common among burn victims. Pain management. Therapy.
And yet he couldn’t bring any other image of her to mind except for the teen beauty she had been, with her oak-colored complexion and long black curls.
So unlike Janeal Mikkado in both looks and personality.
Janeal. It had been some time since his mind had flitted to her. His memories moved in her direction less frequently across the years. He had loved them both, which was something Janeal never understood. Maybe it wasn’t fair of him to think she could. Though his own heart drew lines between passionate and protective kinds of love, Janeal’s heart demanded clearer definitions. The Janeal who knew so precisely what she wanted out of life was the Janeal he loved. She had inspired him to think outside the kumpanía, though at the time he never thought he’d have to leave it.
Katie, though . . . Katie represented to him everything that was good in the world, pure and joyful and free of the cynicism that was so pervasive it had managed to seep into their isolated community. Into Janeal. Even into himself. Katie was a bright blue sky in a dimming world.
Robert’s truck crested a hill and then the road dropped toward a long gated driveway. He passed under a wrought iron archway that bore the house name. The gates stood open.
The halfway house was an adobe rancher shaded by a grove of mesquite trees. The clay-tile roof of the long, low building had been modernized with several solar panels that faced south. Old wooden shutters had been pulled open on the outside of the house to expose new vinyl windows.
Other than a dusty Suburban next to a detached garage, Robert didn’t see any sign of life. He parked near the oak doors that he assumed were the entrance and climbed out.
An attractive middle-aged woman, slender and blond, wearing blue jeans and a UNM sweatshirt came through the doors and extended a hand to Robert.
“Robert Lukin?” she asked. He gripped her palm and shook it. “Lucille Adams. You’re late.”
Robert looked at his watch. Had he told Katie they would come at a certain time?
He apologized because it seemed the right thing to do, then introduced Brian. Lucille gave his arm one firm pump and dropped it. “I’ll take you to Katie, see if she’s still available.”
He was surprised at the bright lighting of the house’s interior. He associated such places with bleakness and had expected the dimness of small windows, wood paneling, brown tile. Instead, the house opened into a bright, skylighted atrium where green plants flourished in a garden the size of a living room. Bleached pine lined the walls, which were decorated with brilliant red and turquoise Navajo rugs.
Lucille made her way around the atrium and past a hallway to an enclosed patio on the south side of the building. Robert followed her across the threshold. This area, too, was a lush indoor garden with cushioned chairs and reading lights and coffee tables. Heat lamps suspended over the plants likely kept the place green through the cold mountain winters.
Two dark-haired women bent over the soil at one end of the long room.
“Katie, Robert and Brian are here.”
The woman with the longer hair sat back on her heels and pushed herself up.
Robert realized he was holding his breath. He exhaled.
She turned around.
Except for the mane of dark curls, he would not have recognized her if they’d passed on the street. She was thinner now, which made her look taller. Her skin was paler than he remembered, and smoother than he expected. He'd braced himself for something hideous. But her face was beautiful, stunning, maybe because the sweetness of seeing the woman he’d loved like a sister and believed dead was greater than the reality of the past.
A creamy ribbon of scar flowed from her left temple and traversed her high cheekbone, ran down to the underside of her jaw, and dropped into her turtleneck. He finally had the presence of mind to look into her doe-brown eyes—
Dull, flat eyes. Dull where they once had sparkled. Flat where they once had been deep pools.
Katie was blind.
Robert averted his gaze involuntarily. The guilt he had felt for so long at having survived at all multiplied, confronted by having also survived physically unscathed. Whatever he had imagined on the way here did not compare to the reality, which knocked the wind out of him and prevented him from even being able to speak.
He felt trapped in this garden room by the idea that he owed her more than he could pay, and at the same time an overwhelming sense that he shouldn’t have come.
Brian covered Robert’s hesitation. He stepped toward Katie as she removed her gardening gloves. He took her hand in his so quickly that she gasped, surprised. He pumped her arm and spoke slowly. “Ms. Morgon, I’m Brian Hoffer.”
At least the kid didn’t yell.
Katie’s shock turned into a slightly mischievous smile and she turned her eyes toward his voice. Enunciating as carefully, she said, “It is a pleasure to meet you.”
Brian dropped Katie’s hand, and Robert noticed for the first time the disfiguring red and white scars that crossed her knuckles and ridged her long fingers as if they were melted candlesticks.
Except for her hands and face, and smooth-skinned feet clad in thongs, the rest of her body was covered: khakis, a plaid cotton shirt over the turtleneck.
She turned her head as if to listen for Robert’s location. Or maybe she was worried about why he hadn’t spoken.
He cleared his throat at the same time she said, “Thanks, Lucille,” and held her gloves out directly to the blonde. “Maybe you and Rita can finish while I show these men around and get them something to drink.” Then Katie turned her head toward Robert.
Lucille took the gloves. “I might plant the hostas somewhere other than where you want them.”
“I might let you,” Katie said. She smiled although Lucille didn’t. When Lucille grunted and joined the other woman, Katie took three steps toward Robert as if she could see him perfectly.
“How are you, old friend?” she asked. Katie tipped her head the way she used to when she would ask him to let her practice reading his palm. She extended her hand to greet him, lacking any self-consciousness.
And Robert, still unable to speak, grasped her hand and pulled it to his heart, encircling her with his other arm so that he could bury his face in her hair and hide the fact from everyone—most of all her—that his eyes had filled with tears.