Chapter One

      Her arm muscles screaming from the weight of the sacked-out toddler slumped against her chest, Kelly McNeil blinked up at the multigabled Queen Anne, so still and serene in the dark...and prayed she wasn’t making the biggest mistake of her life.

      Okay, the second-biggest mistake—

      “Who’d you say these people were again?”

      Behind her, the minivan’s engine ticked itself to sleep, the sound overloud in the deep winter silence, and Kelly smiled briefly for her young son.

      “This is where my best friend lived,” she said, her heart knocking as they started up the softly lit brick walk that bisected the snow-shrouded front yard. “We’ll be safe here.”

      Between the twin disks of his Harry Potter glasses, Cooper’s nose scrunched. “You sure?”

      “Yes,” Kelly said, because she had to believe that or die. As it was, she felt as though she’d never be completely free of the fear knotting her stomach...a fear that had finally trampled her last shred of common sense. Because this was so not her, this was insane, uprooting two kids in the middle of the night and taking them someplace she hadn’t even seen for nearly twenty years. She knew the Colonel still lived there, Sabrina had said so in her last Christmas letter, but his number was unlisted and Sabrina had apparently changed her cell phone number—

      Swallowing hard, Kelly boosted Aislin higher on her shoulder and trudged up the steps to the porch, where brass coach lamps still stood sentry on either side of the glossy black door, illuminating the weathered gray floorboards, the dark green porch swing that had been privy to many a summer night’s adolescent gripefest....

      Blowing out a breath, Kelly pressed the doorbell. A dog barked. A big one, by the sound of it. Coop sidled closer.

      “Dad—”

      “Doesn’t know where we are, sweetie.”

      “You sure?”

      “Positive.”

      “How come?”

      Because by the time she and Rick had met, her third year of college, her father was dead and her mother had moved to Philly and Maple River, New Jersey, had quietly slipped into her past. Oh, Sabrina had been one of Kelly’s bridesmaids and had visited after Coop’s birth, but there’d been no reason for Kelly to return here. “It never came up,” she said quietly, and Coop nodded.

      Except he then glanced over his shoulder, worried, and Kelly tugged him closer, fury hard-edging the fear. A moment later, through the frosted panels framing the door, a light flashed on. Sabrina wasn’t there, of course—girlfriend had traded the Garden State ’burbs for Manhattan years before. And Bree’s mom, Jeanne, had died some years before. Which left the Colonel. Who’d always scared Kelly a little, truth be told. Man hadn’t risen through the ranks of the air force as quickly as he had by being a softie, that was for sure.

      But for all Preston Noble’s penchant for order and discipline, he’d also adored his five kids, four of whom were adopted. And Kelly had come to associate “next door”