Free Courage Tree by Diane Chamberlain

look. The parked car was huge and looked deserted, a white paper stuck to its antenna.
    “It’s a…I don’t know, some big car,” Janine said. “Not a Honda, anyway.”
    “Sorry.” Joe apologized for his erratic driving. He reached across the gear shift to touch her hand, a surprising gesture. “Are you all right?”
    “Fine,” she said. She would have braked with equal force had she been the one driving.
    Joe sighed again. “So,” he said. “Back to Sophie. Here’s what I don’t get. You and I have always talked to each other about how to deal with her, whether we were communicating about her medical care or her behavior or anything. Isn’t that right?”
    She nodded. Joe sounded genuinely perplexed, and she felt guilty. She had always consulted with him in the past and taken his feelings to heart. Decisions about Sophie had, in every instance, been mutually made.
    “I loved that about us,” Joe continued. “I was proud of us. We might have been divorced, but we were still a team when it came to her. Then you go off and do something half-assed like enrolling her in that study. Something that goes completely against what I want.”
    “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I thought it was the right thing. I still think it was the right—”
    “What possessed you?” He looked at her. “You’re usually smarter than that. Whatever made you think Schaefer’s herbs could fix what no one else has ever been able to fix?”
    “I didn’t go into it blindly,” she said. She heard the weakness in her voice. She always felt weak around Joe, as though being near him sucked the strength and self-esteem right out of her. “Lucas Trowell knows a lot about herbs and he researched the ingredients in Herbalina for me. He really felt it might have a chance of—”
    “You know, Jan.” Joe shook his head. The muscles in his cheeks contracted, and she knew he was trying to control his anger. “Lucas Trowell is a gardener . He’s not a doctor.”
    “He knows a lot about herbs, though,” she said.
    “How do you know that? Because he told you so? I think he’d tell you anything to get close to Sophie.”
    There it was again. That Lucas-Trowellis-a-pedophile paranoia.
    “That’s crazy, Joe,” she said. “He’s been very kind to Sophie. She adores him.”
    Big mistake. Joe nearly lost control of the car, sending it over the line into the middle lane, and again, a driver honked his horn at them. “You keep him away from her, Janine,” Joe shouted as he steered the car back into the slow lane. “I mean it! I am damn serious. I don’t want that guy anywhere near her.”
    She hated it when he yelled. Joe had never laid a hand on her, but he didn’t need to. He was big and muscular, and his anger could be so powerful that it alone was enough to frighten her into submission. She lowered herself farther into the seat and shut her eyes.
    “What does it matter to him if the treatment works or not?” Joe continued his argument. “Sophie’s not his daughter. She’s nothing to him. Your judgment is all screwed up.”
    Eyes still shut, Janine pressed her temple to the window. She was not wrong about Lucas, although she’d twisted the facts of Sophie’s enrollment in the study a bit. It was actually through Lucas that she’d learned of the study; she probably never would have known about it had he not told her.
    Lucas had heard a short ad on the radio about a researcher who was looking for pediatric subjects to be in a study of an alternative treatment for pediatric kidney disease. Janine had called about the study and learned it involved an herbal remedy, delivered intravenously. When she told her parents and Joe that she wanted Sophie to participate in the study, they refused to even discuss the matter with her. Instead, they wanted Sophie to participate in a Johns Hopkins study of one more horrid, toxic medication—that if it didn’t kill her—might help her.
    The herbal approach had no such side effects, Dr.