Page 66 of Strangers She Knows

“I don’t want her life to be more difficult.” Rae pushed her hair off her forehead.

Her concern made Kellen’s heart ache. “I don’t, either.”

“I wish we knew what happened to her,” Rae said.

Max came to his feet. “When I was on the mainland, I should have looked her up.”

Rae caught her breath. “I wish you had!”

“It never occurred to me,” Max sounded exasperated with himself. “I’m out of the online habit.”

“Rae, just think, someday someone might be reading your journal and be fascinated about your life.” Kellen smiled at her daughter.

Rae looked down at the book in her hand, and in a small voice, she asked, “Areyougoing to read it?”

“Read what? Your diary?” When Kellen understood what Rae meant, what she feared, she flushed with anger. “I am not! Do you think I’m like Gerard Morgade? A sneak and a bully?”

“Kellen!” Max put out a warning hand.

But he didn’t need to. Rae came to her feet and stood in front of her mother. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean… I just, sometimes…” Her voice trembled with the onset of tears.

That made Kellen calm down as nothing else could. She took a few breaths—this was no time for her voice to freeze in her throat—and in a softer tone, she said, “Sometimes you think bad things about me and Daddy. I know. Sometimes I don’t like you, either. But I like you really hard the rest of the time, and I always, always love you.” She watched while Rae thought that over, and when her frown cleared, she said, “I promise I will never read your journal.”

Rae looked down at the journal, then up at Kellen, then left and right, and her expression was worried again. “A person should always keep a promise, right?”

Again with the promise thing. Had Rae had made a promise she regretted? To Chloe? Or to Maverick?

“Right,” Max said. “That’s why before you make a promise, you think very hard about what it means, whether it’s a good thing, because what if the time comes when you want to break the promise? Or worse, you reallyshouldbreak the promise? You’re stuck.”

“I know.” Rae sat back on the floor with her pen and her journal. “Sometimes I wish I could make time go backwards.”

“Me, too,” Kellen agreed. “I wish that, too. Everybody does at some point.”

Max met her gaze.

She knew why. He blamed himself for not being fast enough to stop that killer, Ettore Fontana, from shooting her.

And she wanted back all the years she’d missed of being with Max and Rae. Yet she couldn’t regret her time in the Army. It had made her a woman like the real Kellen, tough enough to survive and yet caring. She leaned forward and spoke to Max. “We have each other now, and always will, and that’s all that matters.” She picked up Ruby’s diary. “Do we want to read some more?”

“Not that.” Max obviously thought they’d trod on enough precarious ground. He thrust a book into Kellen’s hand. “Read moreWonder. Auggie is brave like Ruby, but in a whole different way.”

26

Still restless, Mara wandered up toward the big house and stood in the shadows on the porch. The open window let in the summer air, and she stared through the screen at the family inside.

For so many years, Mara had had to loathe Kellen Adams from afar. Once Mara had been in charge of the smuggling on the Yearning Sands coast. Then Kellen had betrayed her, tried to kill her, sent her to prison.

Years of plotting and planning, then—escape!

Mara had gone to great lengths to attend Kellen’s wedding, and that moment when Kellen had seen her, recognized her, knew what was coming—that moment had been a triumph.

But Kellen had slipped out of consciousness and Mara’s control, and disappeared into the morass of medical care.

Mara had had to disappear, too. And wait. And wait.

Because Mara aimed all her spite and censure at Kellen, at the sister of her heart, at the competitor of her physical self, and it would not make her happy to unload on anyone else.

Kellen would be sorry. The longer Mara waited, the more ways she thought to torment Kellen Adams. Kellen and her whole wonderful, happy family.

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