The Truth About Comfort Cove

Lucy told the other woman about her scare the week before, the night she’d spent in the hospital at her mother’s bedside.

“At some point your mom’s going to have to deal with what happened. She’s not the only woman who’s ever been raped. Or even lost a child. She has to take some accountability for herself.”

Lucy had heard the words more times than she could count. And always discredited them because the speakers couldn’t possibly know…couldn’t possibly understand.

But this was Emma. Who did know.

Rose grieved. Emma’s life had been hell in many ways. But her mother worked, too. She’d provided.

But Rose hadn’t been raped…

“I don’t see how you can stand it,” Emma said. “It’s like she doesn’t even try to handle things.”

“I guess I’m just used to it,” Lucy said, leaning back in her seat to stare at the white clouds in the mostly blue sky. “Once when I was about six, I’d been chosen to be the narrator in a Christopher Columbus play. I had a special suit I had to wear—black pants and white blouse and a vest—and I felt so…important, you know? I could read and I had a piece of paper with my lines on it, but I memorized them all, anyway. I knew everyone would be looking at me and I had to be one hundred percent completely perfect.”

“I know what you mean. It’s like you have to make up for that which is glaringly imperfect about you. Because everyone knows about that, too.”

“Mama was there,” Lucy said now, speaking slowly as she relived that day. “Front and center, like she’d promised she would be.”

She paused. Emma didn’t speak.

“She was so proud of me.”

Lucy knew that. Sandy lived and breathed for her.

“And she was so drunk that she couldn’t put her two hands together to clap. At the end, we got a standing ovation, and Mama fell over a couple of chairs, causing this crash…?.”

Her face was hot. Just like it had been then.

“Oh, Luce. I’m so sorry.”

“I got over it,” she said. “And she tried so hard to make up for it. That was the first time she went into rehab. Marie stayed with me and when Mama got home she was better for a while. She was always there for me, Emma. I never for one second doubted that I was loved. She just couldn’t handle the big moments.”

Not any of them. Sandy had been present during every important event in Lucy’s life, until Lucy had quit telling her when they were. She’d been present—and she’d been fallingdown drunk.

Which was one reason Lucy would never dare to have a wedding. But she could still have sex. She was a normal, healthy woman. And Ramsey was all male.

“I’m glad that your mom is willing to have Frank at your wedding,” she said, thinking about Emma’s situation from a different angle. “It means that she’s made a conscious decision to move on.”

“I thought so, too. I just don’t like to get my hopes up, you know?”

“Yeah, well, the important thing about that is to know when it’s time to let hope soar.”

She believed what she said. She just wasn’t sure that time would ever come for her and Sandy. Her mother wasn’t like Rose. Sandy was too damaged to recover.

And Lucy had to know why. What had happened to Allie the day that her mother had been raped?

Parked in his sedan down the street, Ramsey watched the regal set of her body, her head, as she went about her task.

Every few minutes she stopped and looked around and then went back to painting.

Ramsey recognized the action. She was watching her back. A common trait in someone who’d been victimized.

The woman was Rose Sanderson. She was fifty-six, not sixty. And still a beauty.

Ramsey had met the woman weeks before, when her daughter’s ex-fiancé had threatened Rose’s life, among other things. Just as Emma had claimed, Rose was fragile where her personal life was concerned. He didn’t want to see her again until he had some answers t

o give her. He had to know what happened to Claire Sanderson.