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Donna Karan suit, her blond hair lying convincingly about her age. Her makeup, her posture, everything perfect. Ashley sometimes thought her mother was created in a lab—the perfect political wife.
    Patty Montgomery.
    When magazines and newspapers ran articles about Patty as the First Lady of Georgia, the mother of the up-and-coming public servant running for Congress—the journalists called her “a steel-tipped southern magnolia.” Which was ironic since she was a transplanted New Yorker. And the accent was a fake-it-till-you-make-it phenomenon.
    But the journalists talked about Patty being the strong, civil-minded woman behind two good men.
    And of course the mother of a recognized foreign aidworker. But somehow Ashley didn’t get the beaming-with-pride mother routine.
    Even now, in this hallway after all that had happened, her mother looked at her in that familiar way.
Such a disappointment,
her expression said.
Again.
    Ashley spent her girlhood cringing from that expression, and the whole of her adult life running from it.
    When she was younger, she never learned, to her mother’s dismay, the way of saying one thing with sugar but meaning something else full of poison. Perhaps it had been Nonnie’s no-bullshit influence. But the way Patty had talked to the world had baffled Ashley, confused her, put cracks in the already weakened relationship between them.
    She had no mind for politics, no concerns for reputation. All the things Patty treasured, Ashley renounced.
    “Mom,” she said. No hug between them. It was hard to remember the last time she had hugged her mother … or her mother had hugged her. Before the situation ten years ago with Brody, surely.
    “You look tired.”
    She smiled, but didn’t put too much work into it.
    “Are you all right?” her mother asked, lifting her chin.
    Ashley, the black sheep of her family in every single possible way, was taller than her parents, but when her mother did that, lifted her chin and looked down her nose at her, she felt about two inches tall.
    “Never better.”
    Patty sniffed at the sarcasm but didn’t respond. Which of course made Ashley feel like a child.
    “I need to lie down, Mom. Can we talk in the other room?”
    “Yes … yes, of course.” For the first time Ashley noticed Noelle in the corner, her mother’s ever-present aide. Her stomach dropped even further into her body.
    Noelle carried a stack of papers and was busy tapping something into a phone.
    The Montgomery political machine constantly had to be fed. Exhausted and unable to keep up with all that was happening she imagined Noelle shoveling coal into a terrible fire-breathing furnace that looked like Patty Montgomery.
    “I don’t see what’s so funny,” Patty said and Ashley pulled her lips back into line. “Are you hungry?” Patty asked. “I had food brought in. Some soup.”
    “Soup?” Amazing. This time when Ashley smiled, she meant it. “Soup would be great.”
    “Go sit down,” Patty said. And weakened as Ashley was, she had a vision, lovely and strange, of Patty actually heating up the soup. Standing over a stove, stirring a pot.
    Magically, Patty would be wearing an apron. For her.
    If her mother would actually do that … so much would be forgiven. That’s how little pride Ashley had left. Maybe after all that she’d been through they could start fresh. Let go of some of the resentment and disappointments that lined their life together.
    But then Patty turned to Brody. “The soup is in the fridge, if you would be so kind. And then, I imagine you can go.”
    Well, there goes that dream.
    “Mom! He rescued me from Somali pirates! Brought me home from halfway around the world. He’s not here to make me soup—”
    “It’s not a problem.” Brody’s low masculine voice was a rumble through the room.
    “Brody, don’t!”
    And then he was gone. Into the kitchen to make soup.
    This was part of the reason why she left her family behind. Because it was so hard to