Free Trouble Don’t Last Always by Francis Ray Page A

butted into her chin.
    “Ooohhh,” Nicole cried, slapping both hands over her mouth.
    Adam froze. “What happened?” Silence reigned. “Dammit, what did I do?”
    “It’s nothing, Adam,” Nicole said, her husky voice sounding strange and muffled with Jonathan’s handkerchief pressed to her bleeding lower lip.
    “Don’t treat me like an idiot. I know I did something.”
    Everyone looked at one another, then away. No one spoke.
    Stepping back, Adam slammed the door.
    Nicole jumped. Tears glistening in her eyes, she stared at the closed door a long heartbreaking moment, then spun on her heels and ran back down the hall.
    It was a good thing Nicole left when she did, Lilly thought, knowing the retreating woman couldn’t hear the crash against the wall.
    Eleanor Wakefield couldn’t sleep. How could she when her children were in so much pain?
    With her arms wrapped tightly around her waist, she stared at the light in the third window at the back of the house. Adam’s room. He had insisted from the first that the light be kept on. He wanted to be able to see if his sight returned. Eleanor knew the last thing he did before going to sleep and the first thing he did on awakening was hold his hand in front of his eyes. The ritual was a daily torment he put himself through.
    If she could, she’d gladly trade places with him. The choice hadn’t been hers to make. Head falling forward on her delicate neck, Eleanor pondered the problem that was never far from her mind: was waiting for the hemorrhage to dissolve the right course of action? If they waited too long, the hemorrhage in the back of the eyes could cause permanent retinal detachment and blindness. If they operated now, they might damage the optic nerve and, again, cause permanent blindness. Until a short time ago hemorrhages were removed within two to three weeks, but recent studies had shown that waiting was the wisest and safest course of action.
    What to do? Alex and his doctors had chosen to wait, but at what price to her son?
    Forcing herself to leave the window, she took a seat on the camelback sofa in the room she had lovingly decorated at Adam’s insistence. He’d said the four-room cottage in back of the main house was to be her retreat, a place to do the painting she never seemed to have enough time to do. He’d surprised her on her first visit to Wakefield Manor. She could still see that quick smile of his, the twinkle in his onyx-colored eyes, when he opened the door where a decorator waited.
    Adam was the kind of son any parent would be proud of.
    Too restless to sit, Eleanor bounded up once again and found herself staring at the back of the house. Light now shone from the window next to Alex’s. Lilly Crawford.
    Eleanor hoped in this at least she had made the right decision. At the time there hadn’t been much choice. As much as it hurt her, she had to come to terms with the fact that instead of her presence comforting her son, it had the opposite effect.
    Adam had always been the strong one, the dependable one. Like most young men growing up, he had tested the rules and boundaries, but that was as it should be. He had a good head on his shoulders his father had said. How she wished her husband were still with her to lean on, to guide her.
    Randolph Wakefield had been a kind, loving father and husband. Losing him so suddenly five years ago had devastated them all. Now this. If Adam’s blindness weren’t horrendous enough, the aftermath was tearing their once-close family apart, and she had absolutely no idea how to make it better.
    This wasn’t drinking or drugs or the influence of unsavory people you could discuss with reason. This was something far more insidious and destructive. She didn’t know how to fight, only that she must. Not just for Adam’s sake, but for Kristen’s.
    Eleanor’s daughter’s life had been shaken enough when her father died of a sudden heart attack while they were playing tennis. She had seen one man she loved and