“I saw the way you were watching her today when she didn’t know you were looking,” Lucy countered.

“I was watching her because she looks like Cornelia Case.”

“She does not.”

A devil prodded Nealy. “A lot of people think I do.”

“You wish,” Lucy said.

“I hate to put an end to the good time we’re all having.” Mat stood. “But we need to hit the road.”

“Butt just ate,” Lucy reminded him.

“We’ll take our chances,” he snapped.

Easy for him to say, Nealy thought less than half an hour later as she tried to clean up the mess from the baby’s latest episode of motion sickness. For the first time since her escape, she yearned for the efficient White House staff that took care of every kind of domestic unpleasantness.

By the time the baby was bathed, her car seat was swabbed down, and they’d found a discount store where Nealy could buy a few clothes to replace those she’d lost, it was dark, Marigold was screaming again, and Nealy had begun to feel as frantic as the baby. “We need to find a doctor! There’s something wrong with her.”

Lucy gave up trying to distract her sister with a Beanie Baby walrus. “Butt doesn’t need a doctor; she’s scared of doctors. She’s hungry and she’s tired, and she wants out of her car seat, and she needs her bottle. That’s all.”

Marigold held out her arms toward her sister and sobbed with frustration.

Nealy sat down in the empty passenger seat. “I think we should stop at the campground we saw advertised on those billboards.”

“I’m not stopping,” Mat said. “We’re driving through the night. One of us can sleep while the other takes the wheel.”

Although he sounded determined, she suspected he knew his plan wouldn’t work but hadn’t gotten around to accepting it. “We won’t be able to sleep with the baby screaming,” she said reasonably. “If we stop now, we’ll get plenty of rest and we can make an early start.”

His sigh was as long-suffering as Lucy’s. “We should be halfway through Ohio by now. We’ve barely crossed the West Virginia border.”

“But we’re having such a good time.”

The corner of that steelworker’s mouth quirked. “All right, we’ll stop. But we’re pulling out at daybreak.”

Hoolihan’s Campgrounds was a small RV park, with not more than a dozen vehicles angled in among the trees. Mat backed into the spot they’d been directed to, turned off the ignition, then got up to retrieve another can of root beer from the refrigerator. Within seconds, he’d left her alone with the children. Even though she knew that was why he’d let her come along, she resented his hasty exit.