Free The Good Daughter by Jean Brashear Page B

hand on Danielle’s hair, sliding the other arm around her shoulders, knowing that a safe touch was something prostitutes craved yet seldomreceived. It was the best way to let Danielle feel that she wasn’t disgusting, wasn’t subhuman. “Yes.” Chloe pressed Danielle’s head against her shoulder. “I’m absolutely sure.”
    Danielle’s body collapsed, huge, shattering sobs shaking her frame. Chloe tightened her arm and stroked the woman’s hair, murmuring sounds of comfort. “Let it go, Danielle. Let it go.” Her own eyes burned with unshed tears.
     
    C HLOE WALKED OUT of the shelter, holding herself erect, fighting against the urge to scream, to pound at the earth, to raise her fists to the sky and curse God.
    So much pain. What kind of world subjected children to such destruction? Sheer will propelled her to her car. She’d go home and shower and try to scrub away all that she’d absorbed from Danielle. Counselors needed walls, too, but if the walls were too strong, the counselor lost the ability to feel. Drained by Danielle’s emotion, she had to fight to remember that she was separate from that woman, that her body had a boundary those stories shouldn’t cross if she was to help.
    A boundary regained at great cost. Right now every nerve was rubbed raw from bone-deep anger at adults who victimized children and set up cycles that passed down through generations. The world was full of Danielles who never got help breaking out of that self-hatred.
    Despair swamped Chloe; the minuscule difference she could make felt so futile. Almost to her car, she suddenly knew she couldn’t drive. Not yet. She headed fora nearby cluster of oaks, seeking shelter in their shade while she pulled herself together. She was so tired she could barely put one foot in front of the other.
    “Doc, what are you doing here?”
    She jerked around to stare at Vince Coronado, his hands filled with bags from a toy store. For a second, his appearance seemed fated. He would understand Danielle’s pain and would have defended her. A part of Chloe craved his strength and his anger.
    But yielding was unthinkable. “I could ask you the same,” she challenged, glancing at the bags.
    Color rose on his cheeks. He shrugged. “I’m visiting someone—” He shifted on his feet, then took a good look at her. “You okay?”
    Compassion. Concern. Both crept beneath her meager defenses. Chloe focused on the trees. “I’m fine.”
    “I don’t think so.”
    Refusing to give in to weakness, she pointed at his bundles. “For the children at the shelter?”
    “Yeah.” But he wouldn’t be deterred. His voice turned gentle and coaxing. “Tell me what’s wrong.”
    His kindness undid her. “Nothing,” she insisted. Then it all caved in on her. Only that my father is desperately ill and the world is an ugly place and— “Excuse me, please. I just—”
    She headed blindly for the shade. Darting behind the huge trunk of a very old oak, she crossed her arms over her chest, hands gripping her shoulders. Lips pressed together, she squeezed her eyes shut as though she were a child who believed that would make her disappear.
    Vince dropped the bags on the lone scarred picnictable and followed. He wanted to shake her out of the obvious lie, yet she appeared so fragile and distraught that he obeyed a different impulse. “Come here,” he said, laying a comforting hand on her shoulder.
    At first she held herself erect. Then her shoulders sagged toward him. Awkwardly, Vince slid an arm around her, feeling her delicate frame tremble. Wanting to shield her from whatever had upset her so badly, he began to draw her against him.
    Instantly, she went rigid, stepping back, arms tight around herself once more. “I apologize, Detective.” The soft, vulnerable woman straightened into military rigor, rapidly disappearing inside the icy woman who’d sat across the desk from Vince only the day before. “That was unprofessional. Absolutely inexcusable.”
    The