“Me, too. By that time, though, Sara and I were grown. I was in the...military,” he said, hoping she didn’t notice the involuntary pause, “and Sara had her own apartment. Maude left everything she had to the two of us and her nephew. We tried to give our share back to him, as her only blood heir, but he just laughed and said he got to keep his aunt for years longer because of us. He went into private practice and made a fortune defending drug lords, so he didn’t really need it, he told us.”

“Defending drug lords.” She shook her head.

“We all do what we do,” he pointed out. “Besides, I’ve known at least one so-called drug lord who was better than some upright people.”

She just laughed.

He studied her small hand. “If things get too rough for you over there, let me know. I’ll manage something.”

“It’s only until graduation this spring,” she pointed out.

“In some situations, a few months can be a lifetime,” he said quietly.

She nodded.

“Friends help each other.”

She studied his face. “Are we? Friends, I mean?”

“We must be. I haven’t told anyone else about my stepfather.”

“You didn’t tell me the rest of it.”

His eyes went back to her hand resting in his. “He got out on good behavior six months after his conviction and decided to make my sister pay for testifying against him. She called 911. The police shot him.”

“Oh, my gosh.”

“My mother blamed both of us for it. She moved back to Canada, to Alberta, where we grew up.”

“Are you Canadian?” she asked curiously.

He smiled. “I’m actually Texas born. We moved to Canada to stay with my mother’s people when my father was in the military and stationed overseas. Sara was born in Calgary. We lived there until just after my mother married my stepfather.”

“Did you see your mother again, after that?” she asked gently.

He shook his head. “Our mother never spoke to us again. She died a few years back. Her attorney tracked me down and said she left her estate, what there was of it, to the cousins in Alberta.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“Life is what it is. I had hoped she might one day realize what she’d done to my sister. She never did.”

“We can’t help who we love, or what it does to mess us up.”

He frowned. “You really are seventeen going on thirty.”

She laughed softly. “Maybe I’m an old soul.”

“Ah. Been reading philosophy, have we?”

“Yes.” She paused. “You haven’t mentioned your father.”

He smiled sadly. “He was in a paramilitary group overseas. He stepped on an antipersonnel mine.”

She didn’t know what a paramilitary group was, so she just nodded.