That creepy Goth girl was becoming a mere memory.

Courtney was lobbying to go to Idaho for the Christmas holidays. Lief wasn’t sure the whole puppy thing was a good idea. “You have to remember, I come from a farm very much like Amber’s farm. Gram and Gramp might want to lock him outside or put him in the barn.”

“But you can just tell them that he’s a house dog, not a farm dog, and they’ll be okay.”

And the other thing was he’d been hoping to spend some time with Kelly over Christmas. Not the whole time, but at least some.

Without a hint or provocation, Courtney said, “Do you just want to stay here so you can be with Kelly? Because I’d rather be with family!”

Sometimes she was so hard to anticipate. Before her mother’s death, she’d liked going to the farm. Afterward, she’d not only hated it, she wouldn’t talk to anyone when they were there and she seemed to take great pleasure in acting and looking as weird as possible. Now they were back to family taking priority.

“Just let me think about it, maybe talk to Gram about it. Or maybe we can get a dog sitter or something…”

Lief, being a smart man with pretty decent instincts, seldom did things for which he had regrets. That’s why he couldn’t believe his own stupidity when he sent Courtney’s dad, Stu Lord, Courtney’s freshman school picture. It was completely unnecessary; they hadn’t heard a word from Stu in forever. Not since Stu gave up even his weekend visitation last spring, if he remembered correctly. He had let Stu know they were moving and Stu had not responded to that either.

Truthfully, he’d sent the picture because he was proud. A proud dad. She’d been lovely in the picture and looked happy. And Lief remembered that the last time Stu had seen her she was pretty scary looking. He wanted Stu to see that his biological daughter was as pretty as her mother had been, was smart, was healthy. He wrote a brief note:

Straight As, horseback riding twice a week, feeling much better about life these days and has made a very nice adjustment to living in the mountains. Hope all is well at your end. Lief.

Then on the morning of December 10, the phone rang. It was Stu.

“Hey, Lief, how you doing, man?”

“Getting by. How about you, Stu?”

“Great, thanks, just great. Thanks for sending the picture, Lief. Damn, the little munchkin looks terrific, doesn’t she? And you say she’s got her schoolwork back up to where it should be?”

“That’s right, Stu. She’s been working hard.”

“Fantastic, and now that she’s straightened out, we’d like her to spend Christmas with us. We’re going to Orlando. Family vacation. I’d love it if my daughter came along. Sherry would love it, too.”

He didn’t even have to think about it. “We already made our plans, Stu. In fact, Courtney was the one who asked if we could go back to the farm, my family’s farm, for Christmas. She’s gotten real close to my mom.”

“Well,” he laughed. And he did laugh it. Well-hell-hell. “You guys might have to plan to do that next year instead. Because Sherry and I and the boys want her with us. We haven’t seen her in a long time.”

“You haven’t called her either, Stu. We haven’t heard shit from you in months. In fact, last time I talked to you—I think it was last April maybe—you said you were all done putting up with Courtney and she was all mine. And Stu—I took you up on that.”

“Well-hell-hell, that isn’t going to cut it, pal, because I have custody. I’m the custodial parent. Remember that little detail? So break it to her, sonny. I want her here by the eighteenth. We head for Orlando on the twentieth. She’ll have a great time.”

“I don’t think so, Stu. Courtney isn’t going to want to do that. And you and Sherry pretty much chewed her up and spit her out already. She’s had enough.”

“Here’s the deal, Lief. You can do this my way or you can flat out refuse, in which case we’re talking custodial interference and I let the law take over. After that, I guess she lives with us permanently.”

Lief felt like the wind was knocked out of him. “Please don’t do this, Stu. Please. It’s taken so much work to get Courtney back on track. I don’t think she can take any more uncertainty or confusion. Please, Stu.”

“Then I guess it makes sense to have her here by the eighteenth. It’s just Christmas. Make her return reservations for January second. Then she can go back to the mountains. Or…? You don’t want to fight this out, do you, Lief, old pal?”

His voice came in a mere scratchy breath. “Please, Stu… Come on…”

“Nah, this is what it is. The eighteenth. Let me know when to pick her up.”

Stu hung up. And for the first time since his wife died, Lief wanted to break down in a bone-deep cry.

Lief called his lawyer before doing anything else. When Lana died, though it only compounded his grief, he knew he’d have to let Courtney go to Stu if that’s what Stu wanted. Fortunately, Stu had a second marriage and family and it wasn’t that important to him, so Courtney went back and forth for a while. Stu was agreeable to a joint custody arrangement with Lief, but Stu remained the primary guardian.

Then came that awful day Stu had said he’d had enough of Courtney. It should have been the best day, but the agony it caused his little girl had pushed Lief over the edge. Lief’s fatal mistake had been in not taking legal action to ensure his custody of Courtney right then. What he’d done instead was pull Courtney in, told her she didn’t have to go back to Stu’s house, not even for a weekend visit, and begun at once looking for a place out of the city. A place away from the noise, confusion and Stu.

Today when he called the lawyer, he was informed that Lief would not only be breaking the law by refusing to let Stu see his daughter for the holiday, but it might make Lief’s petition for custody more difficult. “As I see it,” the lawyer said, “Courtney is close enough to an age of responsibility that a judge would hear her preference on where she’d like to live and with whom. If you cooperate now, that will go down easier. Hard as it might be to go along with this, it’s probably in your best interests, both yours and Courtney’s.”

“She’s not going to see it that way,” Lief said.

On instinct, he drove out to see Kelly. One look at his angry face and she said, “Uh-oh. What’s wrong?”

“Do you have a little time to talk? I have to talk to someone. I’m going to drive to Grace Valley and talk to the counselor, but I have to sort it out first.”

“It’s Courtney, isn’t it?”

He shook his head. “No. But it’s going to be, I know that. It’s her father.”

Kelly frowned. “You’ve so rarely mentioned him, I didn’t think he was a factor.” She pointed to a stool at the work island and poured him a cup of coffee. “What’s happening?”

“I should never have turned my back,” Lief said. “I know this will be hard for you to envision, but before Lana died, Courtney was the sweetest, kindest, most loveable child. There was almost never a problem. Discipline was easy with her. But then her mother died and her life became hell. Not only was the poor kid a puddle of grief, but she started living with Stu, her surviving parent, and visiting me every other weekend. And at her father’s house, she was treated worse than a dog.”

“How, Lief?” she asked. “Was she abused?”

“Stu has a bitch for a wife and two little brats for kids. I think his boys are maybe seven and ten right now. Two years ago, at five and eight, they were horrible, undisciplined monsters. The entire household was one screaming, fighting mess. Courtney would come home for her weekend with me in tears, begging not to be forced to go back there, but my hands were tied. Once she even had a child’s bite mark on her leg! A bite bad enough that I had to take her to the doctor. The clothes in her suitcase would come back ravaged and stained—not with food but with things like marker, paint, bleach. One of the little bastards cut her hair while she was asleep. It was a nightmare.”

“Why would her father let that happen to her?”

“He was absent. He’s a producer, mediocre at best, and his hours were long or he was on the phone or computer. Sherry, the stepmother, didn’t watch the kids—just told them to go play, told Courtney she was a big girl and to stop whining. I’ve never been able to figure out why Stu wanted her around at all—he didn’t spend any time with her, didn’t protect her. I paid child support for the privilege of having her a couple of weekends a month, but surely that wasn’t enough of an incentive for big-shot Stu. And you can probably guess what happened—Courtney changed. She started to look different. She started to act out, to fight back. By the time her hair was seven different colors and she looked like a little horror flick, Stu was ready to negotiate—she could live with me most of the time, visit him once in a while. For the next year she lived with me, visited Stu, kicking and screaming the whole way.

“There were things I noticed much later, after I had her back, things I should have noticed right away, but I’m not an experienced father,” he went on. “She stopped crying about six months after her mom died, about six months after being tortured at Stu’s house. She stopped smiling, too. I regularly checked her internet hits and found she researched suicide. She didn’t eat enough to keep a bird alive and had no guilty pleasures, like ice cream or chocolate. She was failing in school. Things like that. And then one day about a year and a half after Lana died, it all came to a head. Courtney called me from her dad’s house and said to come and get her—her stepmother had told her to get the hell out and stay out or she’d put her in foster care. She said she was going to run away if I didn’t come. She was sleeping on the floor because Sherry’s mother was visiting and her head was bleeding from getting hit with a toy truck.”

Kelly gasped and covered her mouth.

“And I lost it. Lost it. I was there in thirty minutes. Courtney answered the door and I told her to show me where she was sleeping—sure enough, a sleeping bag on the toy room floor. I asked her to show me her regular room—it was a guest room made up for the grandmother, the closet and drawers and bathroom full of the grandmother’s clothes—Stu hadn’t even provided a room for his daughter. Bleeding head from a toy truck? One about big enough to ride! I heard the TV and found Sherry and her mother doing yoga to the TV in their screening room while drinking wine and giggling because they were tipsy. I told Courtney to wait by the door and I went to Stu’s home office, yanked him out of his chair by his shirt, dragged him to the toy room, to the guest room, to the screening room, to the front door to take a look at the back of Courtney’s head, which later took three stitches. And then he told me to get the little freak out of his life, he’d had it with her constant complaining. And I slammed him up against the wall, called him a lot of horrible names and threatened his life.”

Kelly was quiet for a moment. When she finally did make a sound, it was “Whew.”

“Yeah,” he said, looking down. “Big-time Hollywood producer shouldn’t mess with a farm boy. We’re raised a little scrappy out in the country.”

“My God, Lief. I had no idea how traumatized she’s been.”

“Completely. I brought her home, got her right into counseling, though I couldn’t see that it helped much. I started looking for a house out of town and found the one I’m in now. It took me five months to get in it. And believe it or not, Courtney’s come a long way since last spring.”

“Looks like she’s come a long way since I met her. At least she doesn’t ever have to go back to her father’s house.”