Free Equilibrium by Lorrie Thomson Page A

culprit, just a convenient scapegoat for her daughter’s grief. Darcy scoffed at the idea of visiting her father’s grave. Instead, Jack’s former studio served as her in-house memorial. The problem was, Jack didn’t live there, either. Laura had only recently figured that out herself.
    Laura pulled the covers over Darcy’s exposed shoulder, wishing she could protect her more thoroughly and rewrite her daughter’s childhood to include a father who could do no harm. Heaven forbid either one of her children got sick like Jack. The secondhand effects of mental illness posed enough of a burden. Laura sighed and kneeled down next to the bed, an old habit gone by the wayside. If Darcy were really asleep, then she wouldn’t wake from her mother’s nearness. Laura gazed at her daughter’s relaxed face. “I’d do anything to keep you safe, angel.”
    At Troy’s door, she blew her son a kiss across his darkened room, not wanting to wake her light sleeper, her easy child. She’d do anything to keep her son safe, too. When Troy had climbed into Aidan’s truck for their drive to the bike shop, she’d slumped into her desk chair, limp with relief. Troy had worked through his eleventh-hour resistance to renting out the studio quietly, in his own internal way.
    Darcy’s methods were a lot more external.
    Laura padded down the stairs, switched on the kitchen light, and preset the oven to 325 degrees. She didn’t know what she was about to bake, rarely knew until she began these middle of the night cooking frenzies. Showing up and answering the call to the kitchen usually set her creative process in motion. She refastened her satin belt and sat with her chin in her hands.
    She took out two well-used cookie sheets and lined up all the ingredients for gingersnaps, the spicy cookie recipe she’d long ago committed to memory. If she moved really quickly, reciting the list of ingredients and paying special attention to the task at hand, then she could drive away the nightmare’s afterimage. She didn’t need the yoga Maggie swore by, the supposed meditation in motion exercises she taught in group to relaxing Indian music. Laura had her own methods for producing equilibrium.
    She placed the butter in the microwave and gave it a minute on defrost to bring the hardened sticks to room temperature. Thinking of the blood she’d touched in the nightmare, she washed her hands and dried them on rough paper towels until the pockets between her fingers grew raw. Damn him. How dare Jack haunt her so? Was this the thanks she got for loving one man so completely?
    The word raw boomed inside her head, conjuring an image of Laura at eighteen. After her mother’s death, she’d been open to influence, and Jack Klein had been a taker. He should’ve waited, should’ve helped her process her grief. Instead, he’d helped her bury it, along with her childhood. Was it any wonder Laura worried about Darcy’s vulnerability to a charmer like Nick?
    The microwave ding bristled her all over, a disproportionate startled response. She shook her head, trying to regain composure, although she was her only witness to the overreaction.
    She poked the butter to test its give, then added a bit of the dark brown sugar. Drizzling the dark molasses over the golden hills blasted the image of the cramped kitchen from her childhood and the tiny fatherless apartment she and her mother had shared.
    Her tiny fatherless life.
    She readied the dry ingredients and added more ginger than the original recipe called for.
    Sift, sift, sift, sift. She squeezed the metal handle, tried enjoying the snowfall of flour and spice, and the way the beige mounds rested at soft angles, sloping against the rim of the glass bowl.
    She hadn’t had a family, really. None except for her quiet mother, a woman who kept to herself. Kept herself from her daughter, too. So many times, Laura had asked her about her father, always with the same result. Mama smiled her rueful smile, leaving her to