The Comfort of Favorite Things (A Hope Springs Novel) by Alison Kent Read Free Book Online Page A

he’d built to keep that night locked away crumbling around him.

    “You had your reasons,” she said, remembering him arriving at her house covered in blood, shaking and angry and afraid.
    She thought back to the events of that night, the ones she knew, the ones he’d told her: He’d found Robby in an arcade where he was known to hang out. He hadn’t bothered to hide his face. He couldn’t let his sister spend the rest of her school years as the girl Robby Hunt had tried to rape. He didn’t want her living under that microscope, dealing with the pity or the speculation. It was bad enough she would carry the memory of the attack with her the rest of her life.
    It wasn’t like Robby was going to brag about what he’d done. It would’ve been easy to keep it among the four of them, though his siblings had never known Dakota had sought out Thea and shared all. But Dakota hadn’t been thinking straight; his sister had just been assaulted. Honestly, though, had any of them? They’d been teenagers, the Keller siblings with absentee parents, Thea with a mother in name only. Dakota had agreed to pay whatever the price might be.
    Thea had never told another soul. She’d never even mentioned what she knew to Indiana. “Does Indiana know you came to me that night after . . . Robby? Does Tennessee?”
    “They do now,” he said, slicing into the banana spice cake with the brown sugar icing. It cracked beneath his fork like a praline, granules of candy scattering over the plate.
    She thought he might be eating it because with his mouth full he wouldn’t have to talk. She couldn’t imagine he really wanted it. Not if his stomach felt anything like hers, all topsy-turvy and seasick.
    The door chime rang again, and a woman with two preschoolers came in. The children headed for the pint-sized plastic table with building blocks and giant crayons and coloring books in separate slots.
    “That was a stupid thing to do, you know,” Thea said. She listened to the woman’s order. Two dozen cookies for a school party. A custom cake for a surprise anniversary dinner. When she looked back at Dakota he was waiting, one brow arched, fork full of cake at the ready. She hurried to explain. “Keeping what had happened from your parents. Convincing Indiana not to press charges. Robby should’ve been the one arrested. He should’ve been the one to go to prison. Indiana would’ve survived the gossip. She was strong and smart and knew who she was.”
    Dakota shoved the cake into his mouth, shaking his head as he chewed. He looked down, sliced off another bite, then said, “Maybe. Maybe not. It’s not like she had anyone at home in her corner either way. And at least by not telling them, it never became common knowledge,” he said and reached for his coffee. “She was better off with me gone and nobody knowing what had happened than with me being there and everyone pointing fingers and talking behind her back.”
    Whether or not Thea agreed, and she wasn’t sure that she did, she wasn’t going to argue about this. It was over with. Done with. What-ifs and might-have-beens didn’t do anyone any good. Still . . .
    She stared down at the cake crumbs littering the table. “I should’ve come to see you. I should’ve brought her to see you. The few times we connected, that’s all she talked about. Making the trip to Huntsville. How hard it was to get there.”
    He nodded, then kept nodding, as if processing memories to depict what she’d said. “Yeah, well, it was only hard because our parents couldn’t be bothered.”
    And even with all the abuse she’d seen in her life, the indifference of Drew and Tiffany Keller was one thing she would never understand. “That had to have hurt.”
    “Not seeing them? Not really. Not seeing my brother and sister? That was tougher.” He shifted to the side in his chair, bumping one of the legs with his knee, and smiled. “With our folks never around, we’d always had this musketeer thing