now, they’d always heeded her advice.
Gabe also remembered pieces of gossip that gave him an inkling about why Ella might have chosen to cut off ties to that husband—whether he was actually an alcoholic bum or some sort of blasted royalty.
However, Gabe had never found the crassness or the courage to tell Josie the things he’d heard. For one thing, he’d be repeating old gossip. And he’d discovered for himself that most of the talk about the Blume girls was simply untrue. They were a family, not a clan or a coven. Despite the unlucky circumstances of their childhood, Josie and her sisters had turned out great.
Gabe didn’t want to see Josie hurt, and he feared that hurt was exactly where she was headed if she pursued contact with her father. “Josie, I think you should follow your sisters’ examples and forget this. Your mom warned you that no good would come of trying to connect with your dad.”
“Mother’s dead.”
“Haven’t you always said she was very strong in her advice? Very intelligent?”
“She was also very weird.”
Gabe had surmised that much.
“Don’t worry about it,” Josie said, before Gabe could sputter a response. “I’ll keep my first few meetings with my father a secret from my sisters. At least until I feel certain that he is all right. I’d protect my family with my life, Gabe. You must see that.”
Gabe did. He’d never met any siblings with a stronger bond, and that included his identical twin sisters. “If he’s as bad as your mother claimed, meeting him could hurt you,” he said.
Josie laughed. “He couldn’t be any worse than the man my mother described. If I expect a lazy bum from the outset, I can’t be disappointed, right?”
No. That wasn’t right. If the tales were true, she could be crushed. “Except you’ll have a real image to link with her words. As it is now, you can tell yourself that this spitefulness was just another of her eccentricities.”
“If we learn that he’s an epileptic, we could shorten the time it takes to get answers about Lilly.”
“Callie said—”
“Callie’s scared and tired,” Josie argued. “If I check things out before I tell her, she’ll be fine.” Josie wrapped her arms across her middle. “God, haven’t we talked genetics a million times? You won’t marry and have kids because of the Lou Gehrig’s. I won’t because of my mentally unstable mom. I’d have thought that you, of all people, would understand.”
Ah, but there was the rub. How many times had Gabe wished he could live life normally, ignorant of the knowledge that he could pass on the gene for ALS? Had his dad foreseen his future, would he have chosen not to have kids? Was it better to know or not know?
Impossible questions, surely.
“But Lilly’s already here, and so is whatever’s affecting her,” he said gently. “Proof that there’s a genetic predisposition probably can’t help now.”
Josie shivered. “It’s dang cold out here, Gabe. I’m sorry you don’t like my idea.” She hitched a breath as if she was going to say something else, but then she clamped her lips shut and climbed into her truck cab.
Gabe stepped forward so she couldn’t close her door. “Have you found him already, Josie?”
She lifted her chin.
Which meant yes. She’d located her father.
“How? Through an Internet search?”
“Yep. It took some doing, but I found him, and he’s not that far away,” she said, sounding pleased with herself.
Damn.
“When are you going?” Gabe asked. “You said he’s nearby. I’ll go with you.”
She sighed as she leaned backward to fish her truck key from a front pocket. “You think my old man’s going to attack me?”
He rolled his eyes. “No, but you might appreciate having someone to talk to about it all. I could offer another perspective. Play that big-brother role.”
She put the key in the slot, then met his gaze. “You’re intense about this, Gabe. Why?”
If he told her his suspicions, he’d risk revealing secrets she might never learn for herself. Secrets best left hidden.
“You take on too much alone sometimes.” He softened his voice to lessen the blow of his next words. “Shades of your mother.”
“Don’t worry. I’m a big girl. And you’re not really my brother. Goodbye.” She started her truck.
“Call me when you’re going, Josie,” he said over the engine noise.
She shook her head, her expression incredulous, then closed the truck door between them. She zipped out of Mary’s lot and onto the street. She’d be home in two minutes.
On his sensibly slower way home, Gabe vowed to keep a close eye on Josie. They were not only friends, they were also business colleagues currently working on separate contracts within the same housing development.
He knew what she was doing a lot of the time.
Perhaps he could show up unexpectedly at her place on a regular basis and make sure she didn’t meet her father on her own.
If she did it at all.
Chapter Two
Josie’s truck tires spun up a cloud of dust as she traveled a lonely road in the middle of Kansas. When she approached a rise thick with spindly red cedars and yellowing cottonwoods, she spotted a mailbox tilted hopefully out toward the road. Slowing quickly, she read the boxy black numbers adhered to its side. “Nine fifty-four,” she murmured, then glanced into her passenger seat to check her printout. The numbers matched. This had to be the house.
After turning into the drive, she weaved the truck through a succession of dry potholes, then parked behind a dingy white van and yanked her keys from the ignition.
Abruptly, the bold curiosity that had kept her foot heavy on the pedal from her house to this one failed. She opened the bottled soda she’d bought at a highway service station, tipped it high against her lips and winced as the soda went down. It was too warm to quench thirst. Too sugary to satisfy. Josie craved the bitter snap of a cold beer. Just one, for courage.
But she was driving and it was early—she’d had to sneak out at the crack of dawn to avoid Gabe, who’d been wanting to hang out more than usual lately. Besides, she never drank alone, thanks to a nagging worry that her taste for brew meant she was on her way to alcoholism. Like her father.
Josie had her mom to thank for most of that worry. But Ella Blume wasn’t around anymore, to check Josie’s refrigerator for beer bottles or her life for stray men. Despite Ella’s clean, simple living, she’d died of ovarian cancer when she was barely into her fifties.
Her mother hadn’t been wrong about everything, of course, but she hadn’t been right about a lot. All men were not worthless. The outside world was not an evil place. Josie hoped her mother had been wrong about her father, too.
How could a man be completely uninterested in his own children? Would the knowledge that he had grandchildren draw him closer to the family? Would he be concerned about Lilly’s well-being?
Josie had a thousand questions. He’d answer some of them, she was certain. After recapping the soft-drink bottle, Josie set it in her cup holder and eyed the shabby two-story a dozen yards ahead.
For some reason, she’d always envisioned her father in a sprawling ranch. This smallish house had the flat, no-nonsense lines of the Prairie-style architecture prevalent in the Midwest over a century ago.
If someone