Free Love Hurts by Brenda Grate Page A

couldn’t see him, he let his face soften. That look, as far as Anna knew, he only gave to her.
     
    “Hey, what’s up with you, huh?”
     
    Anna hung her head. “I don’t know.”
     
    “Now that’s really not like you. Is it to do with what happened at the art exhibition?”
     
    “Yes and no. I had trouble with the story well before that.”
     
    Cliff leaned forward, his hands clasped together. His bushy eyebrows connected over intense blue eyes. “Can you tell me about it? Is Jilly okay?” His concern caused the emotion she’d been holding in to finally well up. Anna struggled to hold back tears.
     
    “I think Jilly’s okay. Actually, Cliff, I don’t really know. She won’t talk to me. I tried talking to her and we got into a huge fight. I don’t know if she’ll ever speak to me again.”
     
    “Of course she will. She loves you. Just give her some time to cool off.”
     
    Anna sighed. “I’m trying to be patient, but it’s so hard to deal with her. I love her, too, but she exhausts me.”
     
    “Don’t give up on her. Just tell her you love her and leave it at that. She’ll talk when she’s ready.” Cliff studied her with a candid look. “Will you be okay?”
     
    Anna paused before answering as she usually did with Cliff. He didn’t take well to someone trying to gloss things over, and he always noticed if someone wasn’t being completely honest. “Yes. I’m going to be fine.”
     
    “Okay, I’ll accept that. But, if you need anything, and I do mean anything, come to me, okay? I don’t want to hear that something happened to you when I could have helped.” He gave her a strong stare, then relaxed and gave her a quick smile. “Now, I didn’t bring you in here to give you a hard time. I called you in because I’m worried about you. This story, what’s up with that?”
     
    Anna had come to work for Cliff not long after moving to Hope at twenty-three. He gave her a job with her brand-new degree and little knowledge of reporting. All she had was her eagerness and something that brought out the protector in Cliff. He took her under his wing and taught her everything she now knew about the newspaper business. They quickly formed a friendship that had lasted more than a decade. They were careful to keep the friendship a secret so the other staff wouldn’t be jealous. Cliff tended to be even gruffer with Anna around the other staff, and they actually thought he didn’t like her much and wondered why she’d kept her job so long. Anna admired Cliff’s acting skills.
     
    “The story is bothering me because of the boy, I think. He wants to go home, Cliff. He wants his parents back despite what they did to him. I just don’t get it and I can’t get past that.”
     
    Cliff leaned back in his chair and studied Anna. He suited his office. The dark wood of the walls looked beat up, not refined and elegant. The desk looked like the domain of an old-dog reporter. You could picture him pounding out a thousand stories on an ancient typewriter with a sticky t key. The shelves behind his head were filled with books on every subject imaginable. Cliff had eclectic taste in books and nearly everything else. The pictures on his walls were black and white, scenes of old news offices with reporters waving stories over their heads as they ran to stop the presses, a glassy-eyed reporter staying up late to finish his article. In Cliff’s office, Anna felt like she’d stepped back in time to an earlier, simpler age. An age when people had morals and everything made sense.
     
    “It’s your past that’s bothering you.”
     
    “What, you’re a psychiatrist now?” Anna joked.
     
    “No, I mean it. What I think is that if you had been taken from her as a little child, you would still love your mother, too, and that bothers you. You love her still.”
     
    She considered Cliff the father she’d never had. That was why he was the only one she’d ever told about her mother, although even Cliff