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so early that she was surprised to see Noah Kincaid coming her way. “Hey,” she said. “Out for a morning walk?”
    “Kind of,” he answered, flashing her that handsome grin. “I was looking for you.”
    “Me?”
    “Maxie called me this morning—she’s an early riser. She said they were picking this weekend and you’d been refused overtime because of job related injuries. She suggested I might check on you, see how you’re doing.”
    She sat on a swing next to the baby swing. She stopped pushing the baby and gave a little laugh and held out her gloved hands. “It’s true. And as much as I hate to admit this, Tom Cavanaugh probably did the right thing. My hands are sore. I’m nursing some blisters from doing work I’ve never done before, not to mention sore muscles from picking for hours. My right shoulder was on fire. Don’t you dare tell him this, but the blisters on my feet were probably even worse than on my hands, but that stuff he gave me for my hands, that goop, wow. I’m almost as good as new.” She turned her hands over a couple of times so he could see the latex over gauze. “This is a pretty amazing cure.”
    “The shoulder?”
    “Better. Ice packs, anti-inflammatory and a little downtime does the trick.” She tsked. “It killed me to give up the money.”
    Noah leaned against the side of the jungle gym next to Fay, belted in and safe between them. Berry ran around crazily, up the stairs on the slide, down the slide, a swing on the ropes, singing and talking to herself the whole time. But Berry was not the least bit interested in Noah. She was a little on the antisocial side, Nora feared.
    “We started to talk about this a couple of times before,” Noah said. “Do you have family who would be available to help you get over this rough patch? I mean any family at all?”
    “We didn’t get far on that subject because there were too many immediate issues, like the fact that a few months ago my drug-crazed ex-boyfriend showed up here looking for money, attacked me and everyone who was trying to protect me. And that was a situation I got myself into at the age of nineteen.”
    “Well, he’s in jail and out of the picture, thankfully. Family?” Noah asked again.
    “There’s no one,” she said.
    “As in…no one? Or no one you’re not too proud to call on?”
    “I told you—I got myself into this mess and—”
    “I know, we don’t have to go over all that again—I’m up to speed on Chad and pregnancy and getting mixed up with the wrong crowd. You probably think you’re the first person to ever carry that load, but you’re not. I’m interested in knowing more about your family—parents, aunts, uncles, siblings, et cetera. Someone you trust who loves you or at least has enough sense of responsibility to lend a hand.”
    She took a deep breath. “My father left us when I was six. My mother, who was abandoned and stuck with me, struggled for years to make it on her salary alone. We lived from paycheck to paycheck. Right there you have several reasons why she was angry and very bitter. The great irony is, she earned her living as a—are you ready? As a counselor. And when I went home from college to confess I was in trouble in a million ways and needed help—I was flunking out, pregnant, had played around with pot and beer with the boyfriend—she told me to get out and never come back. That’s where we left it. She threw everything that had my fingerprints on it out the front door onto the lawn, Chad drove me away and stuffed me into a flea-bag motel where he left me. I went to Student Services who sent me to the county welfare office and…” She gave her shoulder a little lift—half a shrug.
    “But you stayed with him?”
    “No,” she said softly. “Not really.”
    “But there’s Fay,” he said.
    She nodded but couldn’t meet his eyes. She finally looked up, but all she could muster was a hoarse whisper. “He came and went. And I was so lonely and vulnerable after