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"Exactly"

"I’m sorry, but I had to call"

"Good you did Letup without waiting for a response

Walker replaced the handset in the lass and sed the whiskey in one s loosened in his chest, the old fa for He shook his head He’d be fine Everything was good

He left his glass on the counter and went out to the ht in the mail and tossed it on the hall table He made sure the front door was locked and then he returned to the kitchen and refilled his glass, two fingers of Maker’s Mark, the rest water Easy does it, he thought He shucked his jacket and placed it on the back of a kitchen chair He opened the French doors and went out onto the patio He settled in an upholstered chair and set his drink next to hiined it He re he could breathe for the first tiuy and he knew that

Restless, he got up and carried his drink with hirass He strolled the peri out over the wood-rail fence In the distance, he could see the fairway for the fifth hole at the country club he and Carolyn had joined shortly after hty thousand bucks up front and five hundred a ot assessed for any capital improvements Not that he objected He’d taken a secret pride in their acceptance, given the fact that his own parents had been turned dohen they applied years before Walker was co up in the world

He turned to look back at the house, which was all char and a steeply pitched roof The large central chimney was linked to fireplaces in two rooms, upstairs and down Carolyn had insisted on an extensive re

There was more time for construction than either of thenant, but she miscarried four times and lost another baby at sixteen weeks Faced with the prohibitive expense of additional infertility treatments after five failed intrauterine insee of the process and powered everything through--background check, fingerprinting, a lengthy application with attendant paperwork, letters of recommendation, followed by home visits that included separate and joint interviews It took three months to be approved and they expected to wait for a year before a baby cah Fletcher, the wonder boy, dropped in their laps six weeks later when his intended adoptive nant with twins

When Fletcher o, Carolyn went back into high gear The process was simpler that time since many of the same approvals were in place Linnie came to the with Carolyn at a Christht and a half nant, had come into his office the week before The baby’s father refused to marry her, she’d lost her job, and her parents had kicked her out of the house Would the McNallys be interested? There was no discussion at all The birth uest room for the final weeks before the birth Carolyn and Walker were both present in the delivery rooone, he went back to the kitchen and fixed himself a short one His tension had dione He noticed that eight ood behavior had boosted the effects of the booze He loved the sensation He couldn’t help his He experienced an extraordinary appreciation of his wife, his children, and the life he lived Ordinarily, he held his emotions in check He lived in a state of detachment, a stance he’d developed years before as a matter of self-preservation He was present in his head but his sentiiven free rein It was in quiet uard

Walker still teared up on occasion watching his two little ones who reseh to be mistaken for her "real" kids instead of the s they were Where his love for his as constant, his devotion to his children overrode everything Through them he’d been made vulnerable His heart had opened to them in wholly unexpected ways He’d been surprised by the depth and tenderness of his feelings because his soft side was in evidence nowhere else The loss of either child would be a blow he could never recover from His only prayer, on the rare occasions when he prayed, was that Fletcher and Linnie would be protected from evil and violence, spared illness and injury, disease and death No one knew better than he did how fragile life was