“I’ll call you later and see how he is,” the coach said and reached through the open window to rumple Josh’s sweat-soaked hair. “It was a great practice until you and Tom got into it.”

Luke took his place behind the wheel. “Where to?”

“Cawthorne Acres, I suppose.” Katie was already thinking ahead. “My mom’s probably there and we can borrow her car.”

Luke twisted the key in the ignition. “That’s clear out of town.”

“I know, but—”

“Isn’t there an emergency-care place around here somewhere where we can get that ankle looked at?”

“About half a mile that way,” she said, pointing up the street. “But I hate to bother you—”

“No bother at all,” he insisted and rammed the truck into gear. There was no reason to argue with him, so Katie guided him to the small clinic and felt pretty useless as Luke carried Josh into the emergency area. She’d been here before, not long ago, when John Cawthorne had collapsed and her mother had been worried that he’d suffered a second heart attack. Fortunately his condition had been diagnosed as heat stroke and he’d survived.

Josh’s injury wasn’t life-threatening. The worst that would happen was that he’d be in a cast for a few weeks. Yet she hated the thought of him being in any kind of pain or laid up. Katie wiped her hands on the front of her shorts.

“Look, you can go now,” she said to Luke, once the paperwork was finished and a nurse had come with a wheelchair to whisk Josh to the X-ray lab. “I’ll call Bliss or Tiffany or Mom or someone to come get me.”

“No reason.”

“But it could be a while. He might have to see a specialist.”

Luke eyed her. “Why bother someone else,” he drawled, “when I’m here already?”

“You probably have better things to do.”

He lifted a shoulder as if his own life were of no concern. “If there was something pressing, I’d let you know.”

She was too worried to argue, and while Luke sat on one of the plastic couches and thumbed through a sports magazine that was several months old she fidgeted, paced, and tried not to worry. A jillion thoughts rattled through her head, most of them mixed up with Luke, Josh and Dave Sorenson. How could Dave have died and she not have heard about it? It was true that he and his folks had moved away over ten years before and they had little contact with anyone in Bittersweet, but they’d still owned the ranch next to Isaac Wells’s place. Usually, bad news had a way of filtering back to a small town. Katie’s heart ached and her head pounded with an overwhelming and desperate grief. What could she tell Josh?