She covered the phone. “I know, I know! I’ll be right there.” She came back on the line. “Grant’s starting the car. I have to go if I don’t want to miss the birth of my first grandchild. Can you tell Evelyn about Brianne? I’ll update her from the hospital, if I can. I’ll have my mobile with me, but when I went to visit my friend who had her knee replaced in that same hospital a few months ago, I couldn’t get any reception. I don’t have the foggiest idea why. There’s too much equipment in that place or something. Grant doesn’t believe me, but that’s what I think it is. Anyway, I wanted to get word about the baby to Evelyn before I left, just in case I can’t reach her from the hospital.”

Amarok was speechless. Brianne’s baby was coming now? He couldn’t tell Lara that Evelyn had been abducted for the second time in her life. After what the Talbots had been through before, it was their worst nightmare. The moment he said a word, what they’d endured more than two decades earlier—the knowledge of how Evelyn had suffered—would come back to them, and it would ruin this moment, which was supposed to be special and belong exclusively to Brianne.

Lara didn’t give him a chance to go into it, anyway. She said a fast good-bye and hung up.

He was still holding the phone, wondering if he should’ve told her, regardless, when the door banged open and Shorty’s sister, Molly, marched in, carrying a white sack that smelled like food. “I saw your truck out front.”

“I was just leaving.” He put the phone down and started to go around his desk when she stopped him.

“Oh no you don’t. You’re not getting away from me that easily. I know you’re going through hell, Benjamin Murphy, and I feel sorry for you. God knows I do. But you’re not doing Evelyn any favors by running yourself into the ground. She needs you to be sharp.” She tapped her head with her finger. “To think clearly. To make the hours you do work more effective. And in order to do that, you have to eat.”

He tried to wave her away. He still had all those boxes waiting for him at home. “I’ll grab something at the house,” he said, but she wouldn’t budge from the doorway.

She held up the sack. “You’re going to eat now, so you might as well sit down. I’ve brought you some of my homemade chili. I know you like it. You order it all the time. So don’t give me any trouble.”

To be honest, Amarok was more tired than he was hungry. He’d ignored the complaints of his empty stomach for so long the hunger pains had gone away.

Still, he figured he wasn’t going to get an easier meal. So he took the sack, returned to his desk and wolfed it down in a matter of minutes. “Thank you.” Finished, he tossed the empty bowl and plastic spoon in the wastebasket and tried again to leave.