Barn Sour (Show Jumping Dreams ~ Book 26) by Svendsen Claire

Author:Svendsen, Claire [Svendsen, Claire]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Published: 2016-01-29T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWENTY FIVE

Cat didn’t come home from school. Dad didn’t seem to care.

“She probably just made some friends,” he said as my mother paced the kitchen in the dark. “She’s practically an adult. Cut her some slack.”

But my mother just paced up and down the kitchen in her slippers, her face pale and when she poured herself another cup of coffee, her hands were trembling.

“What if it is Derek?” she whispered. “What if he’s come back for us?”

“Of course he hasn’t,” Dad said, retreating to the living room where he could watch the television and ignore my mother. “Let the kid live a little. She’s had a rough time of it.”

Dad was right. In a way, I did feel sorry for Cat. She’d been pulled away from her mother to come and live with us and then she’d been dragged all the way to Wisconsin and now she was living with a family that essentially wasn’t even hers. Soon she’d be eighteen and it wouldn’t matter but for now she was a minor living with no legal guardian except a stepmother who was flakey and spent half her time in bed sleeping off a hangover.

“You don’t really think Derek is back, do you?” I asked my mother.

I didn’t want to be worried but I was. Derek was a mad man in every sense of the word. If he’d snapped, I knew he had the capacity to come back here and kill every last one of us. Or what if he hurt the horses? I really needed to look into getting that guard dog that I’d talked about. I bet there was one at the shelter all mean and full of sharp teeth just waiting to be adopted and I could train it to stay by my side and attack anyone who came near me.

“He could come back,” my mother said vaguely, interrupting my attack dog daydream. “If he wanted to.”

“But Cat was at school. Nothing could have happened to her there. They have security and stuff. They don’t just let anyone wander on campus.” I paused for a moment, picking at a splinter of wood on the table. It dug into my finger and made it bleed but I couldn’t feel the pain.

“He is her father,” Mom said. “He has a right to be there, to see her.”

Mom was right. Maybe we should have taken out a restraining order against the guy or gone to court to get custody of Cat but that would have cost money we didn’t have and I realized that no one had ever even asked Cat what she wanted. She’d just been dragged around seemingly without much say in the matter at all.

“Do you think we should call the cops?” I said.

“I don’t want to involve them,” Mom said. “Not yet.”

And she went back to her pacing, stopping every now and then to peer out of the window even though you couldn't see anything out there in the dark night.

In the end I went to bed.

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