the gravesite. At first, it had been raised, a soft grassy hump in the earth, but time had flattened it, leveled it to the rut of the path winding through the graveyard. She ran a hand over the plot, carefully and with intent, pressing her palm into the damp earth, stopping when the familiar rough lines of the stones touched her palms.
They were still here…
As Mary had promised they’d be. “The grass will grow around them, Keeley, darlin’, and protect them. They’ll be with her forever. Like our love for her.”
Keeley traced the carefully set pattern, the stone daisies she and Mary had formed, then pushed deep into the soft sod during one of their early visits to the grave.
Mary had been right … about so many things.
In the days before she’d left the Sudan, Keeley had come across a mother burying the last of her four children in a shallow, dusty grave beside the road leading out of Darfur. Keeley closed her eyes against the pain of remembering.
So many dead, and with them gone, so much lost: the innocence and joy of children, the love and nurturing of women, the lore and stories of the elderly, the hope and power of so many young men.
So much killing …
Mothers left with no time to grieve. Or with no grief left in a soul battered by it. Children, women, the elders: in the Sudan, they were fresh meat to the brutal Janjaweed militias who arrived without warning and slaughtered without cause.
With only minutes to spare before forced relocation, the child’s burial was a hasty roadside affair lacking ritual or tradition, attended by only a fragmented group of people whose homes and hearts were too damaged and shocked by the raid—and their own losses—to speak.
Keeley had knelt beside that mother—as she was kneeling now beside her mother’s grave—her psyche numbed by the hunger, pain, and horrific violence of her final weeks in Africa. She’d picked up a handful of stones, and while the mother watched vacantly, she formed a stone daisy over the child’s grave.
Another woman, then another, joined to form a silent circle around the shallow little grave. Each made a flower, each touched the shoulder of the grieving mother. Each then shuffled toward the dust of the road and into an unknown future.
Kneeling in St. Ivan’s well-tended graveyard, Keeley’s vision blurred; her mother’s grave became a thousand graves, graves solitary and long forgotten, left to the sand and soil, embraced only by earth, wind, and fire.
She bowed her head and prayed, first for the mothers of Darfur, then for the nameless child by the side of the road.
With the memories came pain and a surging sea of regret.
She should have done more, so much more, instead she’d been weak, sabotaged and made useless by her own fractured nerves, finally told to go home. A right decision, but her failure all the same.
She stood and looked down at the grave.
In the past, Keeley Farrell, that’s all in the past. Let it go. Let it go.
Her life was here now, doing Mary’s work, helping one person at a time, loving one person at a time, and making sure the doors of Mayday House remained open to the women who needed sanctuary.
It might be a small thing, but it was her calling, and she’d give it everything she had in her to give.
Gus strode out of the bank, enough cash in his jeans to tide him over while he was in Erinville—which he hoped wouldn’t be too long.
As usual the amount of money in the account made him uneasy. Over a million and a half. Hell, he might as well stuff the cash under his mattress for all the thought he gave it. He’d worked his butt off—literally—for years to get it, and now he had no idea what to do with it. In the beginning it was for Josh.
And to open the road to April.
If there was even a chance Hagan knew anything about his sister, Gus had no choice; he had to act on it. The last time he’d seen her she was nine and he was eleven. Since then, no matter how much time he put in, how much