"By pouring bubbles in a baptismal font and spelling out hellfire with fertilizer on the lawn?"
Or choosing women he couldn't fall for so the pain of rejection would be less if they left.
Understanding sure was a bite in the butt tonight. "Something like that."
"And will she get over that feeling?"
"She has you like I had Sister Nic, so yeah, I think she's going to be fine." He hoped.
"I'll take that as an incredible compliment. Thank you."
"It was meant as one, and you're welcome." He let himself play with a lock of her hair, a reward for spilling his bleeding guts at her feet.
>This went beyond scary shivers. Her stomach pitched, but she couldn't frighten Kirstie by throwing up. She swallowed back bile.
"And then I saw him again at church."
Think. Think, damn it. She needed answers from Kirstie now while the conversation was flowing. "What did you talk about?"
"Just stuff, like what he and Daddy did when they were kids. He asked me if my daddy made up fairy tales like they used to do as kids, but I didn't want to talk about that. It made me too sad." Her brow furrowed with concentration. "Oh, and he usually asked about everybody here to make sure we're doing okay."
Alarms went off in Paige's head on a number of counts. Could this man have broken into the clinic, using Kirstie to track everyone's whereabouts? She wanted to believe it was still nothing more than a drug-related incident, but she couldn't ignore the possibility that they were being targeted because of Kurt. And how strange was it that somebody wanted to know about the very fairy tales Kurt had mentioned in his letters? This was too weird.
So many questions without answers.
However, one thing was certain. She wouldn't be leaving her daughter again, which meant an end to fantasies about sneaking away with Bo. Her daughter needed to be her first priority.
Leaning, Paige pressed a kiss against the baby-soft skin of her daughter's cheek. "You did a great job remembering everything. I'm proud of you for being honest."
Tiny arms wrapped around her neck while the sweet scent of strawberry shampoo and healthy little girl swelled her heart. She would die to protect this child, and make sure anyone who hurt her baby suffered the agonies of the damned along the way.
"Time for you to get some sleep, punkin." Pulling away, Paige clicked off the bedside lamp, night-light plug-in glowing from across the room.
"What did it look like back there?"
Kirstie's question stopped Paige halfway off the bed. "Back where?"
"At home."
A year in North Dakota and Kirstie still didn't call it home. Had it been wrong to leave her daughter behind for the trip? She'd just wanted her child safe and protected, yet somehow things went to hell no matter what decision she chose. "It looked almost exactly the same as when we were there. A new family lives in our old house, and they planted the same kind of flowers we did."
"Merry-golds?"
"Yes, and others, too."
"Daddy and me planted a bush once."
She'd forgotten that. Putting the pain in the past had cost her happy memories, as well.
"For Mother's Day, in the side yard, you two planted an azalea as a surprise for me."
"Yep, and Daddy made up one of his stories while we planted it." Her wistful voice mixed with Bo's music echoing up in the dark. "We had lots of fun doing that."
"I bet you did, punkin." She'd been so afraid of upsetting her daughter she hadn't allowed Kirstie to grieve and eventually find happy memories. Another wrong decision she'd made, but one she could rectify. "Would you like to go see that bush and the marigolds sometime?"
"Could we?"
She'd figure out a way to afford it if she had to cure all the cows in North Dakota.