“I didn’t know where Roy was,” she said. “He never got in touch with me after he left.” For six years, she’d waited, hoping he would come get her and take her away. Until he’d walked out, he’d always taken care of her. Been a buffer between her and her mother. Protected her from the worst of it.

By the time she’d been old enough to go looking, she told herself she no longer cared.

“Do they know we’re coming?” Tyler asked. “Do they know about me?”

“Not yet, but they will. We’re going to stay with them for a couple of weeks.” She didn’t mention the fact that Roy was in prison. Time enough for that later. Nor did she discuss the possibility of the girls living with them permanently. Maybe other family could take care of them.

“I grew up in a small town called Fool’s Gold,” she said. “It’s in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains.”

“Do they get snow?” he asked eagerly. Because at age eleven, seeing snow was about the best it could be.

She laughed. “Probably not in June, but yes, they get snow. There’s lots to do there. Hiking, swimming. There’s a river and a lake.”

“We could go camping.”

She made a noncommittal noise in her throat, mostly because the thought of camping ranked right up there with being awake during open-heart surgery. Not even thinking about it was pleasant. But then she wasn’t an eleven-year-old boy. She hadn’t been fascinated by worms and dirt and play cars and plastic guns, either.

More traits she knew he got from his father. Which was another problem. Not the traits, the man himself. Odds were Ethan was still in Fool’s Gold. The one place he’d asked her not to be. He’d made it clear he didn’t want her or his kid around.

Well, he was just going to have to get over it, she told herself. This was an emergency. She wouldn’t make a big deal about Tyler being in town and she certainly wouldn’t tell her son about his father. Not when Ethan had rejected them both so completely.