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She could tell by Sam’s pout that she would have a hard time escaping a late night with her. Maybe she could talk her into just hanging out by the lakeshore and talking.
“Okay. I guess we’d better hurry if we want to have time to make our salad.”
Sam hurried toward the front doors, and Katrina turned back to her list. Only the items from the vegetable aisle, then she would be done. She headed in that direction and spotted a flustered Bowie Callahan trying to keep the boy with him from eating grapes from the display.
“Stop it, Milo. I told you, you can eat as many as you want after we buy them.”
This only seemed to make the boy more frustrated. She could see by his behavior and his repetitive mannerisms that he quite possibly had some sort of developmental issues. Autism, she would guess at a glance—though that could be a gross generalization, and she was not an expert, anyway.
Whatever the case, Callahan seemed wholly unprepared to deal with it. He hadn’t taken the boy out of the store, obviously, to give him a break from the overstimulation. In fact, things seemed to have progressed from bad to worse.
Milo—cute name—reached for another grape despite the warning, and Bowie grabbed his hand and sternly looked down into his face. “I said, stop it. We’ll have grapes after we pay for them.”
The boy didn’t like that. He wrenched his hand away and threw himself to the ground. “No! No! No!” he chanted.
“That’s enough,” Bowie snapped, loudly enough that other shoppers turned around to stare, which made the man flush.
She could see Milo was gearing up for a nuclear meltdown—and while she reminded herself it was none of her business, she couldn’t escape a certain sense of professional obligation to step in.
She wanted to ignore it, to turn into the next aisle, finish her shopping and escape the store as quickly as she could. She could come up with a dozen excuses about why that was the best course of action. Samantha would be waiting for her. She didn’t know the man or his frustrated kid. She had plenty of troubles of her own to worry about.
None of that held much weight when compared with the sight of a child who clearly had some special needs in great distress—and an adult who just as clearly didn’t know what to do in the situation.
She felt an unexpected pang of sympathy for Bowie Callahan, probably because her mother had told her so many stories about how mortified Charlene had been when Katrina had a seizure in a public place. All the staring, the pointing, the whispers.
The boy continued to chant “no” and began smacking his palm against his forehead in rhythm with each exclamation. A couple of older women she didn’t know—tourists, probably—looked askance at the boy, and one muttered something to the other about how some children needed a swat on the behind.
She wanted to tell the old biddies to mind their own business but held her tongue, since she was about to ignore her own advice.
After another minute passed, when Bowie Callahan did nothing but gaze down at the boy with helpless frustration, Katrina knew she had to act. What other choice did she have? She pushed her cart closer. The man briefly met her gaze with a wariness that she chose to ignore. Instead, she plopped onto the ground next to the distressed boy.
In her experience with children of all ages and abilities, they reacted better to someone willing to lower to their level. She wasn’t sure if he even noticed she was there, since he didn’t stop chanting or smacking his palm against his head.
“Hi there.” She spoke in a calm, conversational tone, as if she were chatting with one of her friends at Wynona’s shower later in the evening. “What’s your name?”
Milo—whose name she knew perfectly well from hearing Bowie use it—barely took a breath. “No! No! No! No!”
“Mine is Katrina,” she went on. “Some people call me Kat. You know, kitty-cat. Meow. Meow.”
His voice hitched a little, and he lowered his hand but continued chanting, though he didn’t sound quite as distressed. “No. No. No.”
“Let me guess,” she said. “Is your name Batman?”
He frowned. “No. No. No.”
“Is it...Anakin Skywalker?”
She picked the name assuming by his Star Wars T-shirt that it would be familiar to him. He shook his head. “No.”
“What about Harry Potter?
This time, he looked intrigued at the question or perhaps at her stupidity. He shook his head.
“How about Milo?”
Big blue eyes widened with shock. “No,” he said, though his tone gave the word the opposite meaning.
“Milo. Hi there. I like your name. I’ve never met anybody named Milo. Do you know anybody else named Kat?”
He shook his head.
“Neither do I,” she admitted “But I have a cat. Her name is Marshmallow, because she’s all white. Do you like marshmallows? The kind you eat, I mean.”
He nodded and she smiled. “I do, too. Especially in hot cocoa.”
He pantomimed petting a cat and pointed at her.
“You’d like to pet her? She would like that. She lives with my mom now and loves to have anyone pay attention to her. Do you have a cat or a dog, Milo?”
The boy’s forehead furrowed, and he shook his head, glaring up at the man beside him, who looked stonily down at both of them.
Apparently that was a touchy subject.
Did the boy talk? She had heard him say only “no” so far. It wasn’t uncommon for children on the autism spectrum and with other developmental delays to have much better receptive language skills than expressive skills, and he obviously understood and could get his response across fairly well without words.
“I see lots of delicious things in your cart—including cherries. Those are my favorite. Yum. I must have missed those. Where did you find them?”
He pointed to another area of the produce section, where a gorgeous display of cherries gleamed under the fluorescent lights.
She pretended she didn’t see them. Though the boy’s tantrum had been averted for now, she didn’t think it would hurt anything if she distracted him a little longer. “Do you think you could show me?”
It was a technique she frequently employed with her students who might be struggling, whether that was socially, emotionally or academically. She found that if she enlisted their help—either to assist her or to help out another student—they could often be distracted enough that they forgot whatever had upset them.
Milo craned his neck to look up at Bowie for permission. The man looked down at both of them, a baffled look on his features, but after a moment he shrugged and reached a hand down to help her off the floor.
She didn’t need assistance, but it would probably seem rude to ignore him. She placed her hand in his and found it warm and solid and much more calloused than a computer nerd should have. She tried not to pay attention to the little shock of electricity between them or the tug at her nerves.
“Thanks,” she mumbled, looking quickly away as she followed the boy, who, she was happy to notice, seemed to have completely forgotten his frustration.
CHAPTER TWO (#u8447eef0-0e4a-5b31-be04-0115090733b8)
WHAT WAS GOING on here?
Bowie followed the gorgeous woman with the sleek fall of honey-blond hair, listening to the steady stream of one-sided conversation she seemed to be having with his heretofore nonverbal little brother.
He felt as if he had just slid down a rabbit’s hole, into a bizarro world where it wasn’t at all out of the ordinary for a woman to take a strange kid under her wing in the grocery store and where a pretty smile could divert an out-of-control boy from a full-blown meltdown.
He didn’t know what to think. Who was she? And how had she managed to reach his brother so quickly and so efficiently?
He certainly hadn’t been able to pull it off in the three weeks since Milo had been dumped in his lap—the brother he never knew existed, from the mother he hadn’t seen or heard from in nearly two decades.
He was no closer to knowing how to avert the frequent meltdowns than he’d been the day he got that phone call from Oregon Social Services and flew immediately to Portland—despite extensive research and training on behavior modification.
Rabbit hole. That accurately described where he’d been the last three weeks, falling down one blind chute after another.
A month ago, he thought he had his world pretty figured out. He had a fantastic job he loved that offered the sort of challenges he craved. Maybe he hadn’t been completely thrilled about leaving the excitement and dynamic energy of Silicon Valley at first, but after his first few months in town, Haven Point had been growing on him.
The town was small but charming, with a vast lake and soaring mountains that offered an abundance of recreational opportunities for a guy who loved the outdoors. He had been thrilled to take on the challenge of overseeing all the research and development at the new Caine Tech facility in town.
If he ever stopped to think about it, he couldn’t help a spurt of pride at how far he had come, all through his own talent and drive—from a fifteen-year-old homeless kid on the streets of Portland to a major shareholder and the director of R&D at one of the country’s most influential and innovative tech companies.
And then had come that phone call less than a month before and the difficult decisions with which he still wrestled.
“Before she died, his mother named you guardian to your brother,” the social worker had said. “It’s not legally binding as you had no formal agreement.”
“How could we?” he had shot back. “I haven’t known where she was for years, and I certainly didn’t know she’d had another kid, twenty-five years after she had me.”
If he had known, he wanted to think he would have tried to rescue Milo, to find some kind of stable situation where his half brother could get the medical and therapeutic treatment he so obviously needed.
“You’re under no legal obligation to take custody of Milo,” the social worker had gone on as if Bowie hadn’t spoken. “If you refuse, he will simply remain in the foster system. You should be aware that he will probably end up institutionalized in a special school, as he’s been...difficult.”
And just like that, he knew his life was about to change. He couldn’t do it. He had spent enough time in and out of foster homes, between Stella’s brushes with the law or her frequent court-ordered rehab stints or those times when she simply disappeared for weeks at a time.
How could he inflict the same kind of life on another kid? Somehow warehousing him somewhere—out of sight, out of mind—didn’t seem the answer either.
Bowie’s skills with a computer had paid off handsomely in shares and patents with Caine Tech, and he had more money than one man could ever spend. Since he had the resources to provide a better life for Milo, how could he live with himself if he walked away and tried to forget he had a half brother tucked away in an institution somewhere?
He still wanted to think he had made the best decision, going through with the guardianship papers. That didn’t necessarily make it an easy one—nor did his almost unlimited resources help him find qualified caregivers who would stick, as the last few days amply demonstrated.
“You think those are better than these? Hmm. You might be right. These are from right here in Idaho.” The woman with the dimpled smile held out a clear plastic bag near the cherry display. “I need to fill this bag about halfway. Can you help me do that?”
Milo nodded with an understanding and eagerness that shocked Bowie, who had seen nothing similar in his own interactions with him.
“Thank you, Milo,” she said with an approving smile when she apparently judged she had enough cherries. “That’s perfect. My friends will really love these. Can you help me find the bananas now? Do you know what a banana is?”
He didn’t nod or smile or otherwise give any indication he understood, but he led her directly to the stacks of greenish-yellow bananas.
She followed him there and was reaching for a bunch when a girl with red braids and a couple of missing teeth raced over to them.
“Miss Bailey! Miss Bailey! Hi, Miss Bailey!”
Milo’s new friend beamed at the girl, who threw her arms around the woman’s waist. “Hannah Lewis,” she exclaimed as she hugged her back. “Hello! Look how tall you are! And your hair’s gotten long. It’s still such a beautiful color. Are you sure we can’t trade?”
The girl giggled and tossed her red braids. “I haven’t seen you in forever! Since last summer, anyway. Are you going to be back teaching this year? I hope so! Mrs. Chatterton, the lady who replaced you, is nice and stuff but not as nice as you. My brother’s going into the second grade, and he was so sad that you weren’t going to be his teacher. Maybe now you can be!”
For a moment, sadness flickered across the woman’s lovely features, but she appeared to make an effort to wipe it away.
“I’m afraid I’m not coming back to Haven Point Elementary right now.”
“Why not? Don’t you like being a teacher? You’re so good at it! I liked having my third-grade teacher last year, Mrs. Morris, and I learned my multiplication tables really good from her, but you’re still my favorite.”
Miss Bailey—at least he had that much of a name—looked touched. “That’s very sweet of you to say, Hannah. Thank you. I’m afraid I’m not back to stay, only for a month, for my sister’s wedding. I’ll be gone again before school starts up in the fall.”
“Oh. That’s too bad.” Hannah looked as if she wanted to say more, but her mother called her over with a smile and friendly wave at Miss Bailey. “I’d better go. My dad’s waiting in the van, and we told him we would only be a second. Bye.”
“Good to see you, sweetheart.”
She hurried away, and Bowie finally spoke. “You’re a teacher. That’s why you knew just what to do with Milo.”
She looked down at the boy, who was fully concentrating on trying to twist together three ties from the produce bag rack.
“I was a teacher. I taught second grade at Haven Point Elementary School for three years. Well, I guess I’m still a teacher. I’ve spent the last year teaching English in South America. I’m sorry I didn’t introduce myself before I took off with Milo to buy cherries. I’m Katrina Bailey.”
“Bailey. Any relation to Mike, who runs the auto body shop?”
“That’s my uncle—and my stepfather. It’s a long story.”
He held out a hand. “Bowie Callahan. You’ve met my brother, Milo.”
She shook his hand, not bothering to hide the surprise in her expression. “Your brother.”
“Half brother. That’s an even longer story.”
“Well, Bowie and Milo, it was nice to meet you. I should go finish my shopping.”
He didn’t want her to leave suddenly. “Thank you for stepping in. Milo can be...difficult.” That was an understatement that didn’t begin to describe his obstinate sibling.
“No problem. Welcome to Haven Point.”
She started to push her cart away, but Milo raced after her and held out the tangled twist tie.
“Thank you,” she said, taking it with a soft smile toward the boy. “Goodbye.”
Milo didn’t return her smile—Bowie would have been shocked if he had, since he rarely did—but he wiggled his fingers in return, which Katrina Bailey seemed to find charming.
She pushed her cart away, reaching for a bag of green onions on her way. As she did, Bowie’s brain sifted through the information he had just learned from and about her, and he realized in an instant that she could be exactly what they needed.
If he were the churchgoing sort, he would have called her the answer to his prayers.
“Wait,” he exclaimed.
Katrina turned at his overloud call. “Yes?”
“Did I just hear you’re only in town for a month?”
“That’s right,” she said warily. “My sister is getting married in a few weeks.”
“I don’t suppose there’s any chance you might be looking for a temporary job while you’re in Haven Point.”
