Page 86 of Second Start: Family
Kenzie lifted her head. She’d wondered about that. She’d wondered how much and how long Bret had manipulated Adam. She’d wondered how much of his emotional problems were caused by his mother’s departure and how much might have been caused by overcompensation for it.
But she was in no position to address those questions, even if there’d been answers to them.
She didn’t respond to Vicky’s comment, returning to her main point. “Other people get attacked or abused or … I failed him.”
“How the hell do you figure that?” Bodie demanded.
“He was my student. I should have seen—”
“He wronged you. You can say he was sick, but he still wronged you and I—”
Cambria rested her hand on Bodie’s forearm. He stopped speaking even before he looked at his wife.
Maybe her older brother truly had changed.
At last, because not to do it would have been so very obvious, she looked toward Hall.
He did not return the look. But at least he finally spoke.
To Vicky.
“Did you know?”
“Yes.”
“You didn’t tell anybody?”
Vicky returned his hard look with an even harder one. “No. It’s Kenzie’s business of who to tell and who not to tell.”
“The committee that hired me knows. I didn’t hide it. It’s there in my record—”
“Along with the exoneration,” Vicky said.
“But that doesn’t mean Naomi’s lawyer can’t twist and turn it to their advantage.” Hall stood, his motions jerky. “I gotta get home to the kids.”
*
“If he thinks—”
“Be quiet, Bodie.”
Whether Kenzie’s order alone would have done the trick they’d never know, because Cambria also clamped her hand on his arm.
“Hall puts his kids first. I understand that and so should you. You’re reacting because you think he’s hurting me, but you wouldn’t think much of him if he didn’t think of his kids first.”
Bodie’s jaw didn’t ease, but he dropped his head forward, reaching out as he did and taking his sister’s hand. “Kenzie…”
There was a lot in the word. How much it hurt him to see her hurt. How he wanted more than anything to make her hurt go away. How he understood he couldn’t. How he wanted them to start over. As the people they were now. Adults. Brother and sister.
Kenzie turned her hand to grasp his back.
Sister and brother.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Up on the ridge, with the Black Colt Creek drainage on one side and the Dorcas Creek drainage on the other, Dan went to the spot he knew where scrub and grasslands mingled and tethered Buster.
Antelope were on the move a ridge over. Then a coyote, two. Both going the same direction as the antelope, though in traveling mode, not hunting.
