She shivered, remembering. Morris knew how much she loved Tad, and she knew that if he planned to get even with her, Tad would be his means to do it.

So she worried incessantly about Morris getting out. The sentence had been for six years, but an attorney who knew his public defender told her one day in the office weeks ago that Morris had apparently been a model prisoner and there was talk that he might get out sooner. Banks had just confirmed that rumor.

One of her ideas about finding a home for her and Tad was to apply to the military. She would get a signing bonus that would provide a lot of new clothes and comforts for her and Tad. In addition, she’d get a place for her and Tad to live, where they wouldn’t have to cope with Morris. There would be free medical care and dental, and insurance. The only downside was whether they’d take her. She had a health issue that she never discussed. But a doctor would spot it right away. Maybe she could find some way to deal with it beforehand.

Sure, she thought miserably, just like I’ve dealt with a better place to live and good clothes for Tad that didn’t come out of thrift shops. Utilities and house payments and medicine and groceries took almost all her salary. Almost everything they wore had belonged to somebody else first. She didn’t mind. She was grateful to have clothes at all. But it sometimes meant squeezing her feet into shoes that were a size too small or too large and jeans that she had to roll up because they were too long. She was luckier fitting Tad.

But he grew like a weed. He was tall now and getting taller by the day. Clothes didn’t last him as long as they lasted her. And he’d been having issues at school that she didn’t know how to deal with.

As a substitute mother, she was pretty much a dead bust, she sometimes thought. She loved Tad and she did everything she could to make him happy. But he got in fights and she didn’t know why. He wouldn’t talk to her about things that bothered him. He put on that sunny smile that she loved and said that she didn’t lay her problems on him, so he wasn’t laying his on her. Once, concerned, she had Cal Hollister come over and talk to him. She never knew what was said, but soon afterward, Tad stopped getting in fights and maintained a good average in his grades. Hollister, she thought, could work magic in one small boy.

Tad knew about Morris, of course. He’d only been three at the time, but he remembered Morris hurting him and knocking Clancey around when she tried to defend her little brother. He was afraid of Morris. So was Clancey. He worried, as she did, what they’d do when their stepbrother got out of prison.