The Truth About Comfort Cove

Or she’d get herself addicted to sleeping pills in assisted living and sleep her whole life away.

No.

Lucy’s only hope of keeping her mother alive, of ever having a mother with any semblance of a life, was to find out what had happened to Allison Hayes.

Nothing short of peace of mind was going to save Sandy’s life.

CHAPTER NINE

E ight o’clock came and went. Sandy had been moved into a private room for the night and Lucy had spent the past hour sitting in the chair that was her bed for the night, watching her mother’s face, listening to Sandy’s easy breaths, paying attention to the blood-pressure monitor that was attached to her mother’s finger.

All was well. She could see the proof of that with her own eyes. And was afraid that if she quit watching even for a second, Sandy’s hold on life would weaken.

As soon as her mother was conscious, she was going to promise Sandy that she wouldn’t have to test

ify. Or ever be questioned about Sloan Wakerby again.

Lucy had set her phone to vibrate, and she jumped as a sudden pulsing started at her hip. Right next to the gun holster she was still wearing under her jacket, having come straight from work.

Brushing by the gun, she pulled her phone out. Her insides leaped as she saw that Ramsey Miller was calling.

Moving quickly, but watching her mother until she was at the door, Lucy made it out to the hall by the third ring. After the day she’d had, a dose of Miller was just what the doctor would have ordered for her if he’d known to do so.

“Hello?” She moved farther down the hall, motioning to the nurse at the station that she was out of her mother’s room as she walked past. She didn’t want Sandy to hear her voice and wake up, but she also didn’t want her mother unattended.

“It’s Ramsey.” He didn’t usually bother with introductions. “I know.”

“Just wondering if you’d had a chance to get to UC.”

Lucy’s head hurt. She still hadn’t fit dinner in. “I’m sorry, Ramsey. I had plans to have lunch with that friend of mine I told you about who runs a DNA lab in Cincinnati—”

“The one who made the Buckley database for you.”

“Right. Anyway, I was going to go to UC after lunch, but I didn’t make it to either.”

“A new case?”

“No.” She walked past patient rooms with lights down low, televisions on softly, and felt like she was on a loudspeaker. “I was called into Smith’s office on my way out the door.”

She made it to the ward’s door, and pushed through, ending up in a deserted elevator vestibule, with a padded bench under a window.

“Smith’s office? Why? What’s up?”

Making a beeline for the bench, Lucy sat down. “I broke protocol.”

“You want to talk about it?”

She needed to talk about it. She needed him. But that was against their unspoken protocol.

As soon as she got through this rough patch in her personal life, she’d be just as adamant as Ramsey about keeping herself emotionally unencumbered and singularly focused on the job.

“I went to see Sloan Wakerby on Wednesday.”

“You didn’t mention it when we talked.” The caring tone in his voice tugged on the string unraveling inside her.

“He’s messing me up. Maybe I didn’t want you to know that.”

“Have I done something to lose your trust?”