When I reached the nurses' station, the woman who'd called me earlier, Kendra Miller, told me that my mother had come out of surgery and had been placed in a medical coma to give the injury to her brain a chance to heal. Apparently, she had been shot in the head and in the shoulder. Her condition appeared to be stable at the moment, but it was too early to know whether she had suffered any brain damage.

While I listened as carefully as I could, my heart was beating so fast that I could barely concentrate. And when Nurse Miller led me down the hall, panic rose within me.

With every step I took, my need to run increased. I didn't know what I was doing here or why I was by myself. I couldn't do this on my own. I should have told Dani. I could feel my fingers tingling. I wanted to reach for my sister's hand. I wanted her to be at my side. I wanted us to face this together. But I'd left her out of it. I'd chosen to protect her from this stressful situation. It had been the right decision, but still…

The nurse waved me into the room. I drew in a breath and moved forward. The person in the bed was hooked up to machines and tubes. It took a long minute for me to let my gaze slide up her body and settle on her face.

She didn't really look like my mother, at least not the woman I remembered. Her once long, brown hair was streaked with gray and cut short to her shoulders. A wide bandage wrapped around her head. Her face was very pale, and her breath barely a whisper. Her eyes were closed so I couldn't see if they were the deep-blue violet I remembered. But as I stared at her for a long minute, her features resonated deep within me. I knew her face. I knew her nose and her mouth. I knew the freckle under her left eye that matched mine.

The truth hit me like a punch to the gut.

This woman was my mother.

The woman in this bed had once loved me and sang to me and laughed with me. She'd told me she'd always be there for me, but that had been a lie. She'd left me. She'd left Dani. We'd thought she was dead. My father had told us she had died.

Had he lied? Was he in on the secret? Or did he think she'd died, too?

I suddenly felt dizzy, overwhelmed with shock and emotion. I didn't know what to think. It was difficult to process the fact that my mother was alive…but barely.

That realization created another wave of conflicted feelings. My mother might not have died twenty years ago, but she might die before I had a chance to ask her why she'd left and why she'd stayed away.