So every week she came here and sat in this circle and tried to connect in some small way to the rest of the planet. As it was now, she felt like she was on a distant shore, staring across a raging river at the Land of the Worried Well, and it wasn’t that she begrudged or belittled them. On the contrary, she tried to take strength from being in their company, thinking that maybe if she breathed the same air they did, and drank the same coffee, and listened to their stories…maybe someday she would live among them once again.

As a result, these meetings weren’t a religious thing to her, and unlike the fecund mother hen next to her with the obvious Bible, Marie-Terese’s Good Book stayed in her purse. Heck, she brought it only in case someone asked her where it was and it was a good thing it was only the size of a palm.

With a frown, she tried to remember where she’d picked it up. It had been somewhere south of the Mason-Dixon, in a convenience store…Georgia? Alabama? She’d been on the trail of her ex-husband and had needed something, anything to get her through the days and nights without losing her mind.

That was what, three years ago?

Seemed like three minutes and three millennia at the same time.

God, those horrible months. She’d known getting away from Mark was going to be awful, but she’d had no idea how bad it would really get.

After he’d beaten her up and abducted Robbie, she’d spent two nights in the hospital getting over what he’d done to her, and then she’d found a private investigator and headed after them. It had taken all of that May, June, and July to locate her son, and she still to this day had no clue how she’d gotten through those horrible weeks.

Funny, she hadn’t had her faith back then and things had still worked out, the miracle she had been praying for being granted even though she hadn’t really believed in who she was asking things of. Clearly, all the entreaties had worked, though, and she could remember with total clarity the sight of the PI’s black Navigator pulling up to the Motel 6 she’d been staying in. Robbie had opened the SUV’s door and stepped into the Florida sunshine, and she had meant to run toward him, but her knees had failed. Sinking down onto the sidewalk, she had held her arms out as she’d wept.

She’d thought he was dead.