Resolutions by Jane A. Adams Read Free Book Online Page A

family. Maybe he did. Either way, I think she did the right thing. Finally.’
    Mac glanced sharply in his direction. ‘You think the wife knew what Rains was into?’
    â€˜How can a woman not know? I mean . . .’ Alec shrugged and trailed off.
    â€˜People keep secrets, even within families,’ Mac argued. He thought of Ginny, the woman he had bumped into so unexpectedly in the café and wondered again if her husband really didn’t know how she came by the extra money. Surely, by now, he’d realize she didn’t actually have a cleaning job? ‘People see what they expect and want to see,’ he said. ‘Some things feel so unbelievable or so unacceptable that they really don’t see them. The human brain is nothing if not flexible.’
    Alec snorted. ‘Look, I can fully understand not wanting to see, not wanting to know, but there must be something at the back of your mind tells you this isn’t right or that doesn’t add up. The way I see it is that she put her own kids at risk too.’
    â€˜I thought Rains didn’t touch his own children.’
    â€˜Well, no, he didn’t, but you’re not telling me he wasn’t tempted and you’re not telling me there wouldn’t have come a time when his friends didn’t get access to them.’
    â€˜Maybe,’ Mac said. ‘Most people do have their line in the sand, even if it’s a pretty wavy one.’ He found himself thinking about George and Karen and what they’d gone through with their violent father, and their mother too battered and beaten by years with him to be capable of fighting back. Karen had drawn her own line and it had been a pretty decisive one. She’d realized she could do nothing to change or save her mother, do very little, when her dad was around and she was so young, to protect herself, but when Parker had come back from a spell in prison and started hurting George, he’d crossed Karen’s line and she’d made him pay for it.
    Mac found himself excusing her attack on Edward Parker, her father. The world would not be a worse place for his loss, but it seemed that once she had crossed her line, set herself up as protector of her little brother, there was nothing she was incapable of in pursuit of that. He had once told Rina that he thought such love would become a terrible burden for George to bear, and he had seen nothing that disabused him of that view. Worse, his attempts to protect George from knowledge of what his sister had done and why had come to nothing. George was not someone who refused to see. Loyalty and love might prevent him from speaking of it, even with Rina or Mac, but he had said enough for Mac to understand the depth of George’s comprehension. George, young as he was, looked life in the face and dealt with it.
    Karen was capable of everything, up to and including murder – up to and including such obsessive love that Mac feared for anyone who might stand in the way of it, and that, bizarrely, included George himself.
    â€˜Penny for them,’ Alec said.
    â€˜Oh, I was thinking about home. Frantham.’
    Alec smiled. ‘About Miriam?’
    â€˜Actually, no. Not at that particular moment, but now you’ve brought her to mind . . .’
    Alec laughed at that. ‘I’m happy for you, I really am. We all thought . . .’
    â€˜That poor old McGregor was a lost cause. Hey, don’t bother to argue, I thought it too. But I’ve been lucky.’
    Lucky that new friends had chosen him, taken it upon themselves to make him whole again. And what a bizarre selection of people they were, Mac thought.
    Further thought was interrupted by their arrival at the prison gatehouse, and Mac turned the focus of his thoughts back to the man they had come to see. ‘I never interviewed Rains,’ he said. ‘What should I expect?’
    Alec reached through the window to present their ID and permission to