CHAPTER ONE

      November Near Barren, Kansas

      “WOULD YOU LIKE to hold your babies?”

      The nurse’s soft voice reached Hadley as if it had come down a long tunnel, the words echoing inside him. He stared through the big window of the nursery in Farrier General Hospital, where the two little infants wrapped in pink and blue blankets, looking for all the world to him like a pair of burritos, wriggled in their plastic isolette. One tiny hand waved in the air as if to say hello. Another set of china-blue eyes gazed straight at him. They were less than an hour old—and they had no mother.

      Hadley couldn’t seem to grasp the notion. Only this morning Amy had pressed his hand to her swollen abdomen. “I think it’s today,” she’d said with an angelic smile, not afraid at all of the painful process to come. She should have been.

      Before she’d even turned thirty, Amy was no more. “Complications during delivery,” the doctor had tried to explain, but nothing registered with Hadley. The words banged around in his skull like so much mumbo jumbo, and even Sawyer McCord’s comforting hand on his shoulder couldn’t make it real.

      Hadley had stumbled from the waiting room down the brightly lit hallway in a daze, and he was still in it. Underneath the fog that had taken over his brain, though, something else kept demanding his attention, tapping at his memory and telling him to pay notice. Hadley just couldn’t remember what that was.

      The nurse repeated her question, then said, “We have a small lounge you can use.” She gently took his arm and led him a short distance away to the open door of a room. “I’ll bring them to you.”

      “No,” he began, heart in his throat. Even after the long months of waiting, he wasn’t ready; he’d told Amy often enough that he would never be ready, which had only led to yet another of their usual impasses.

      But the nurse had already disappeared through the door across the way where Hadley was able to pick out the low murmur of voices among the other nurses. He saw one of them swipe at her eyes.

      This was not the happy occasion it should have been—most of all, for Amy—but Hadley didn’t quite know how to grieve. They’d separated earlier in the year, but during one last night together they’d created two new lives. The news that she was pregnant had cut short their divorce proceedings.

      He’d promised to stay with her until the babies were born, then they’d decide about the future.

      The situation now seemed bizarre, and everything in Hadley’s life had been temporary. His whole approach to things was what he called the finger-in-the-dike method, plugging up one hole as it sprang a leak, then the next. He didn’t stay long anywhere he happened to land. He’d never had a home, a real family. What was he going to do now with the twins?

      In