Child by Chance. Tara Quinn Taylor

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СКАЧАТЬ served using that energy to figure out his son. But then, he struggled with everything he knew about Kent, and about grief and kids going through grief, and kids who lost their mothers, and boys’ relationships with their mothers, and ten-year-olds in fourth grade on an almost hourly basis, too.

      Wonder was that he got anything else done.

      Must be like Brooke had always said— laughingly in the beginning and then, later, not—he was the master of multitasking. He worked on a campaign and his mind also germinated other issues at the same time.

      He slept and seemed to work out solutions to problems, she’d once said to him. She’d begun to take offense at the way he always seemed to have plans for them, to know what they should do in any given situation. She’d begun to feel as if she was losing herself little by little to him.

      Shaking his head, Sherman moved from one social networking site to another and swore when his computer froze up on him.

      His time on the case was limited by the fact that he didn’t ever work on it when Kent was awake. Brooke’s death had changed their son. Clearly, he wasn’t recovering as well as they’d all hoped. Wasn’t adjusting at all as Dr. Jordon had first predicted he would. Sherman wasn’t going to make matters worse by bringing up evidence in the case for his precocious son to grind in that busy mind of his.

      While the cursor turned over and over on his screen as the web page loaded, he moved to the computer on the next wall in the office he and Brooke used to share and he and Kent now shared. Using his mom’s computer had been important to the boy.

      Signing on, he opened the internet browser, typed what he wanted and, while he waited for the screen to open, perused the list of recently accessed folders that had flashed on the screen when he’d put his cursor in the search bar. He’d pulled off all of Brooke’s files, storing them on an external hard drive in his room, before he’d turned the computer over to Kent.

      Mostly it was school stuff. Kent regularly showed Sherman his computer work. Making everything accessible to his dad had been one of the prerequisites of his son’s having his own computer. There were dangers out there that Kent might not be aware of. And he’d readily agreed to Sherman’s rules.

      Sherman didn’t exercise his right to search very often. It wasn’t as if Kent had a lot of time at the computer without Sherman present in the room. But when he saw a folder he didn’t recognize— triq3tra—he investigated. The folder was three-deep in last year’s math folder. He’d never have found it if it hadn’t been in the recently used list. Heart beating uncomfortably, he clicked on it, hoping to God he and Kent didn’t have worse problems than he thought.

      The file was password protected.

      No matter what he tried, Sherman couldn’t open it.

      * * *

      TALIA WAS IN the shower Saturday morning, trying not to worry about the fact that she hadn’t even started her homework for the coming week and was working eight-hour shifts at the mall in Beverly Hills both Saturday and Sunday. She’d always been a night owl, even before her previous profession. And she had no social life—completely her choice. She knew she’d get the work done.

      She just preferred to keep to her schedule.

      “Tal?”

      At first she thought she’d imagined the voice. Her inner self calling her to task, no doubt.

      “Talia?”

      “Oh!” Through the glass door of the master bathroom shower, Talia saw Tatum round the corner. She turned her back and instinctively covered herself, then realized what an idiotic thing that was to do.

      “Sorry,” Tatum said, sitting on the stool in the separate room across from the shower. “But it’s not like I haven’t seen it all before,” she said.

      When Tatum was small, more often than not she’d showered with Talia. Someone had to help the little girl bathe, make sure that she got the soap out of her hair.

      “I’m not used to have someone walking around my house while I’m showering,” Talia said.

      She didn’t want her sister to see the body that had rocked the stage more nights than she could count. She knew she’d get over it in time—time took care of everything, didn’t it?—but right now, her naked body shamed her. Illogical though that was.

      “Sorry,” Tatum said again. “You’re usually heading out the door by eight. It’s five to, and when I saw your car but you didn’t answer my knock, I got worried.”

      And Tatum, like Sedona and Tanner, had a key to the place. At Talia’s insistence, not theirs. She wanted her little sister to have a place to hang out, or hide out, at any time for any reason. “I was up late last night,” she said, finishing her shower and reaching for a towel at the same time she shut off the water.

      “Doing homework?” Her sister’s voice came through the open door. Talia could see her denim-clad knees bobbing up and down.

      Tatum knew her schedule.

      “No.”

      “You spent the night with his collage, didn’t you?”

      An adult might have been too polite to ask. Tanner would have been too cautious around her to push.

      “Yep.”

      As Talia wrapped a towel around her body and another one around her head, Tatum left her perch on the stool and followed her to the bedroom. “And?”

      All of Talia’s underwear was still pretty much the unmentionable kind. She just couldn’t afford to replace them and had no intention of anyone seeing them.

      “Pick me out something to wear, would you?” she asked, pointing to the walk-in closet opposite the regular closet on the far side of the room. Her stuff would have fit easily in her regular closet, but she’d never had a walk-in before. She liked getting dressed in it. It was like a private dressing room.

      At the moment, it gave her the privacy to grab a thong and a scrap of lace with underwire and get them on before pulling on a robe and heading back into the bathroom to semidry her hair. Just enough to get it up in a twist. Any more than that would dry it out.

      “How often do you wash your hair?” Tatum asked, coming in to sit on the counter and watch as Talia expertly flipped the long blond strands up and around her hand. Hooker’s hair, she thought, knowing full well that it had made her a lot of money over the years. She should cut it. Dye it.

      But she’d always loved her hair. Even as a little kid.

      “Three times a week,” she said.

      “I only do two.” Tatum picked up her can of hairspray, read the label. “Otherwise, it gets too dry.”

      “Have you been using the hydrating conditioner I gave you?”

      “Yeah. And the detangler, too.”

      “It’s only been a couple of months. Give it time. Your hair will be soft as a baby’s by summer.”

      She liked to dress before applying her makeup—so as not to smear anything on her clothes. СКАЧАТЬ