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6
    Malinda Keane clicked off the phone in the teachers’ lounge.
    Thank the Lord Michael was all right. She shut her eyes and whispered a prayer for him. She’d prayed for him every day since the first time his newborn baby hand grabbed hold of her finger. Such a perfect baby. A good boy. A teenager spared death and given back for some special purpose. A fine man who would someday realize that purpose in the Lord’s good time.
    She shouldn’t have given in to the impulse to call Michael. He wasn’t a child. Hadn’t been a child for many years. She’d managed to allow him to patrol the Columbus streets without calling him every hour, although sometimes worry for his safety had been like a live thing perched on her shoulder, digging its talons down all the way into her heart.
    But for some reason when the rumors and stories began flying around the school about a man found shot on the courthouse steps, she hadn’t been able to contain her uneasiness. Prayer hadn’t helped. Telling herself not to be a meddling old lady hadn’t helped. She had to know, to hear with her own ears, that Michael was not that man.
    Not that she really thought he was. She told herself he wasn’t. Nobody had any reason to shoot Michael on the Hidden Springs Courthouse steps. But somebody had gotten shot there. Somebody whose family was going to hear how he died and say there wasn’t any reason for it. What possible reason could there be for anybody to get shot on the courthouse steps?
    When things were not lining up with cause and effect the way numbers in an algebra equation lined up, then anything could happen. Anything could have already happened. And so the uneasiness had spread inside her until she wondered if there was a reason for it. That was why she’d let her fingers punch in the sheriff’s number. She could have called Michael’s cell, but she hated those things. Left her own in the car during the school day. But she’d had to know.
    Michael wasn’t her son but near to it. After the accident that took his parents, she guided him through a kind of rebirth that made a special bond between the two of them.
    Even now, more than ten years later, she still missed James and Eva. In ways, James had been her child too. He was barely eight when their mother died suddenly. Malinda had been fifteen going on thirty, or so her father always told people. He said she was born responsible. It had never felt like a compliment. Plenty of times Malinda hadn’t wanted to be the responsible one. Times when she wanted to be flighty yet beloved like her mother. Or beautiful and treasured like some of her friends. Even carefree and happy the way James was then.
    But a person was whoever they were. Perhaps the Lord looked ahead in her life and knew what she would need to be to do the tasks he had in mind for her. Knew that hermother would be hopeless at running a household, even when she wasn’t crippled by those blinding headaches. Knew her father would lose heart for pounding pulpits and preaching repentance and would retreat from the world after her mother passed on. Knew that James would need a mother more than a sister to help him become the man the Lord wanted him to be.
    Thank heaven for Eva. She was a special gift to James. Eva was as different from Malinda as two women could be, but they were alike in their devotion to the Lord and to James. From the first moment they met, they were sisters in their hearts. Malinda missed Eva every bit as much as she missed James. Maybe more. She’d known she couldn’t step into Eva’s place in Michael’s life the way she’d stepped into her mother’s place for James. She’d always been more mother to James than sister, even before their mother died.
    At the same time, she hadn’t been about to let Michael follow his parents into death. Not without an all-out battle. She’d prayed fervently with absolute faith