It's Never too Late

“She wasn’t really worried about me getting into trouble. She was worried that the state would come and take me away from her if she wasn’t well enough to care for me.”

“So what did you do?”

“I charmed a young nurse into showing me how to use a blood pressure cuff, and then marched into Nonnie’s room and show

ed the doctor that I was fully capable of taking care of her at home. I was already nearly six feet tall and clearly able to lift her. It didn’t hurt that I had my driver’s license in case of an emergency.”

Addy was sharing the couch with him, but she hadn’t touched him. He hadn’t touched her, either. He knew better than to play with fire.

“I’ll never forget the look on Nonnie’s face when I proved to the doctor that I knew what I was doing. It was the first time there was a switch in our roles, and as a guy who’d been fighting to prove his manhood, the moment was sweet. I also think that day was the first time she realized that I would always be there for her, able to take care of her, no matter what.”

“Was that when she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis?”

“No, her blood pressure problems aren’t directly related to the MS, although both can be triggered by stress. The MS diagnosis came about three months later, after a lot of tests that didn’t turn up anything else.”

That had not been a good day. The day he’d sat with Nonnie and heard she had an incurable disease had been the first time he’d realized he was going to be alone in the world someday.

Completely alone.

* * *

BY MONDAY, NONNIE was back to her usual self—maybe even a bit better, since she’d been forced to rest for forty-eight hours. Though Addy hadn’t known the woman a long time, she felt pounds lighter as she let herself into her side of the duplex that afternoon after coming home from class and spending the next hour visiting with Mark’s grandmother.

Thoughts of the night ahead were turning her joints to jelly and she had work to do. She also had no idea whether she’d even see Mark that night. He was off work at eight and probably had homework to do.

But if she did see him...

Would he...?

She’d driven out to the big-box store after class and purchased birth control. Every time she thought of it nestled in the bottom of her purse, her nerves got a bit more jittery.

Oh, she’d had sex before. But none of her lovers had moved her to the point of fantasizing about them nonstop.

Time to focus. To work.

So far she’d neither experienced nor witnessed any sign of preferential treatment in any of her classes, at the Montford library, the computer lab, or with campus food services. She’d signed up for the drama club, which was due to have its first meeting later that week, and she was considering rushing a sorority. She’d heard from the editor of the school newspaper. They were going to publish her article, right next to one with an opposing viewpoint.

Handled professionally.

Just as she’d have advised.

But the Randi Parsons Foster situation could be a problem. A baby sister who called in favors for athletic scholarships didn’t look good on a university president’s record. Nor did gross overspending without more than a written reprimand attached. Not when accompanied by a promotion to a head position before the age of thirty.

She still had files upon files to weed through. The rest of the personnel files. Financials. Student records.

She’d made it as far as the Ss in the personnel files and was determined to make it through the whole alphabet before she’d allow herself to head outside for a nightcap.

Matthew Sheffield. He was right after Barbara Schmitt. Hired at thirty-two as technical coordinator for the performing arts center thirteen years before, Sheffield was currently listed as the center’s director, a position he’d held for nine years. The quick promotion for a man in his early thirties was unusual enough for her to want to look into the situation more closely. The fact that his file was sealed had her even more curious.

Because she worked only the cases she handpicked and because she had her own practice rather than belonging to a firm, Addy couldn’t afford paralegals to do her research for her. Which meant she paid for access to secure information sites.

Signing on to a secure site where her law degree allowed her membership, she quickly found Matt Sheffield’s birth certificate and his known addresses. From there she moved on to other legal documents. The man had been married only once, to his current wife, Phyllis Sheffield, sister of Caroline Strickland, all of whom currently resided in Shelter Valley. Caroline Strickland—her landlord?

There’d been another Sheffield on the employee roster. Flipping quickly between documents, she confirmed that Phyllis Sheffield, formerly Phyllis Langford, was a psychology professor at Montford. And she remembered something else, too.

The file she needed was somewhere...on the right-hand corner of the table. Tory Evans Sanders’s file. The woman who’d impersonated her older sister and taught English for a semester before confessing what she’d done—the woman who’d never been charged—had lived with Phyllis Langford when she’d first come to town. Phyllis and Tory’s older sister, Christine, had been close friends. Phyllis had been responsible for Christine getting the job at Montford—all according to the newspaper article Will Parsons had written for the campus newspaper the semester following Tory’s tenure there. A follow-up to the original article published when Tory’s duplicity was first discovered.

None of which meant anything...