She was kind of pretty, but he would have thought her a whole lot prettier if she weren’t so thin. The way she’d pecked at breakfast this morning had been disturbing. He wondered if she was one of those health-food nuts.

People like that always made him shake his head a bit. Of course, as Mary had always said, “If folks worked hard enough or exercised enough, they wouldn’t have to worry about everything they put in their mouths.”

True, he supposed. His family had always worked hard on this ranch, and most of them had lived to a very ripe old age. Right now he should have been working alongside his dad and granddad, and would have been except for an accident on an icy mountain road eight years ago.

Cripes. He caught himself, wondering why he couldn’t stay away from the paths of grief and loss. He’d made peace with all that. It was the way of life. All life.

Relief filled him as he heard the sounds of an approaching truck engine. His help was arriving, and now they’d be so busy he wouldn’t have time to think.

No time to think of lost family and wife, no time to try to avoid noticing that Courtney was appealing in a way he’d never thought he’d feel again.

Thinking had become an enemy of sorts. Something to be dodged unless it was squarely focused on work or the boys.

Well, he had plenty to do today and that would prevent him from having to play hide-and-seek inside his own head. Thank God.

The boys came home from school between three and four. Evidently they must have a rather long bus ride. Courtney heard their return with relief, because other than an offer of lunch she had skipped, she had spent the day being a voyeur in the life of a dead friend.

It hurt. She felt guilty. But she also felt envious. Mary’s emails to her sons had been both beautiful and touching, and incredibly upbeat. Given that Mary’s days had been almost entirely devoted to dealing with the ugly consequences of the worst side of human nature, the tone of her communications was remarkable. She always found some cute and funny story to tell the boys, often about a dog some of the hospital members had adopted.

Courtney knew that adoption was officially frowned upon. Dogs in Iraq were considered unclean animals, and lived out their short and pathetic lives as scavengers who were often kicked and otherwise mistreated. Soldiers naturally wanted to save them, but official policy forbade it. Many rescued dogs were ordered killed if commanders found out about it.

So the tales of how the hospital managed to keep and hide a dog were filled with life, laughter and even a touch of amusingly wicked pleasure.

Another insight into Mary, one that made Courtney like her even more. And miss her even more.

An insight her sons would cherish more as they grew older.

But whatever Courtney had hoped to find, she quickly divined that she would not find it in emails to the boys. That left copies of their Skype conversations, photographs and any videos Mary might have mailed home.

By the time the boys returned from school, she was quite certain she was not up to viewing them. Not today. Not after the emotional morass she had hiked through in reading those emails. Seeing Mary’s maternal side made her acutely aware, as never before, of just what the twins had lost and would now never know.

She was just about to shut down her computer, but decided to check her email first. She had a few friends who might be wondering where she had gone, and she probably needed to assure them she was really just on a vacation, far, far away.

And indeed the first several were exactly what she expected, friendly demands to know where she was, requests for a photo or two, declarations of envy.

But the fourth in the list came from an address she didn’t recognize. Thinking it must be junk mail her filter hadn’t caught, she clicked on it, wondering why it hadn’t been shuffled to the correct folder.

What she found made her neck prickle.

I know what you’re up to. If you think you can get away with it, you’re wrong. I’m watching you.

Her heart slammed, and she could barely breathe. She’d felt the implied threat before, but always so subtly she had been able to think she was imagining it. Those orders to stop investigating had always been couched in reasonable terms, making it impossible to say for certain that there was any intended threat.

But there was no mistaking that email. A shiver trickled down her spine, but then she reminded herself that no way on earth could anyone know she was here. Before leaving, she’d made noises about going to the Pacific Northwest to enjoy a cooler climate and some time on the water. Heck, she’d even left a couple of brochures on her desk.

No. No one could know she was here. Absolutely no one.

Fear and shock quickly gave way to anger. Using the skills she had learned on her job, she tried to trace the email’s origin, and found it came from an anonymous account in Finland. Damn, she hated those things. They were virtually impossible to break through.

Finally, disgusted, she deleted the mail and shut down the machine. Her self-control back in place, she got up from the computer, packed up the emails and the CDs and went out to the kitchen where she heard the voices. The boys were already diving into an after-school snack.

As she entered the room, Dom said to them, “I’ve got another twenty horses to do, and then I’ll be done for the day and we’ll start dinner. Be sure to get going on that homework.”

“Okay,” came a pair of answers.

Dom saw Courtney and looked at her. The quietude had come back to his dark eyes, and it didn’t waver when he saw her. “You must be hungry by now. Ask the boys what’s handy. I need maybe another hour with the horses.”

“Thanks.”

He gave her the briefest of nods, clapped his hat back on his head and strode out the back door.

Kyle got her an apple and she joined them at the table.

Todd asked, “You got any kids?”

“No.”

“Are you gonna stay for a while?”

“I don’t think so. Maybe another day.” She wondered why the boys exchanged looks at that, but decided maybe they were relieved to know life would go back to normal soon.

And it was possible to tell them apart, she realized. There was the slightest difference in their noses, a small hint of a downturn at the corners of Kyle’s eyes. Not something to be noticed at a glance. And Todd had a very tiny mole on his left cheek. “I can tell you apart!” she announced with surprise.

That caused both boys to shriek with laughter. “They put us in separate classes cuz the teachers have trouble.”

“Let me guess. I bet you sometimes switch.”

They shifted, their guilty looks answer enough. Courtney laughed. “And I bet you don’t help them out at all.”

Kyle shrugged. “Why should we? All they have to do is really look at us.”

Courtney couldn’t really argue against that. Even if playing jokes and switching classes wasn’t a good thing to be doing. And that caused her to think of something else. “Does it bother you that they don’t look?”

Apparently they hadn’t thought of it in those terms before. And why should they, given their youth? Replies were slow in coming, almost as if they wondered if there was a right answer. Or as if they weren’t sure how they felt.

“I guess, sometimes,” Kyle said eventually. “Mostly it seems funny.” He glanced at Todd. “Right?”

“Mostly,” Todd agreed. “But sometimes it’s not so funny.”

“Like when?”

“Like … like when we can switch classes for a whole day and nobody notices.”

Courtney’s heart twinged. “Does it make you feel invisible?”

Todd shrugged. Apparently the waters were getting too deep for a seven-year-old. “I dunno. It just isn’t funny sometimes.”

“I guess I can see that.” And she could. “But you know what?”