Always Mine (Love in Eden 1)

"You want to come help me find a carrot for Millie?" I asked.

Thankfully, my sister didn't share my mother's fear of me. She nodded and took my hand. I led her to the tack room and sat her down on an overturned bucket. I took a seat on another one. I reached out to stroke her hair. "You okay?"

Sara nodded but didn't say anything. She rarely spoke. It always broke my heart when she only responded with a mere nod or shake of her head. And laughter? That was something I wasn't even sure I’d ever heard her do. I sighed because I didn't want to beat around the bush with Sara. She was a bright girl and she understood exactly what was happening. She knew her mother was very ill, and she carried the weight of that on her young shoulders. It shouldn't have been that way, but the alternatives weren't any better. We didn't have any relatives to lean on, so that meant one thing… foster care. If she ended up being taken away from our mother for any reason, she’d go into the system. Even though I was her brother, I was a convicted felon, so the chances of being able to adopt her were slim to none.

"I'm working on getting you guys up here, okay?" I murmured. My initial plan had been to move my sister and mother into the foreman's house once it was done, but it was uninhabitable at the moment, so it would take me months to fix up. After seeing my mother's meltdown today, I wasn't sure we had months. And I sure as hell didn't want to put Sara through that for months. I only had one option, and I wasn't sure it was even an option. "You hanging in there?" I asked.

Another nod.

"School’s okay?"

"It's summer," she reminded me.

"Right," I muttered. How could I have forgotten that?

"Is Mrs. Betts taking good care of you?" I asked. Bessie Betts was a former teacher who lived next to my mother and often babysat Sara while my mother worked as a waitress.

Sara shrugged. I took that as a no. I figured it meant that Sara was probably staying at the woman's house during the day, but that she was left to her own devices to entertain herself. My sister was a voracious reader and spent many hours at the library picking out new books. I had plans to buy her an e-book reader for her birthday the following month, but I wasn't sure how any of that worked. I wanted her to have access to any book she wanted, but it wasn't like she would have any money to actually buy those books. I'd heard one of the ranch hands saying you could borrow books from the library on the e-readers, but I hadn't had a chance to check it out.

"You remember my number if you need anything, right?" I said as I reached for a bag of carrots on the counter behind her. She nodded and accepted the carrots that I handed her. We returned to the stall. I was glad to see my mother had calmed down a bit more and was in the process of running her hands over her dress, as if to smooth out the wrinkles. Her hair was back in a ponytail that was tidier than it had been after she'd attacked Brooks. Curtis and my mother were talking about the county fair coming up a couple of weekends from now.

I was surprised when Sara turned to me and asked, "Will you take me?"

My sister rarely ever asked me for anything. And the fact that she didn't want our mother to take her was telling. My mother didn't seem to even register what Sara was asking and that she was asking it of me rather than her. Things like that rarely did resonate with our mother… it was part of her disease. It made her focus more on herself than anything else. I knew it wasn't her fault, but it was still hard to know that Sara wouldn't be her first priority until we found the perfect balance of medication for her and she actually took it on a daily basis.

The last thing I wanted to do was spend time in Eden in a public setting, but I couldn't deny Sara the request. "Of course," I said. “I have off that Sunday.”

Sara gave me a little smile and nodded, then turned her attention to feeding the carrots to the horses. The rest of the visit was uneventful, which I was grateful for. But it had me shifting my mind back to Brooks and everything that had happened. As we left the barn, I scanned the driveway for his car, but it was still gone. I started to get antsy as I thought about the possibility that maybe he'd left for good. We’d been in the barn long enough that he could have come back, packed his things, and left again. But I doubted he’d leave without saying goodbye to his uncle. I held on to that fact as I said my goodbyes to my mother and sister. As we watched the car make its way down the driveway, Curtis patted my shoulder. "You want to talk about it, son?"