The McRae Series 01 - Twelve Days Sam and Rachel

he didn't think it was enough for him anymore. And he didn't know what to do.

Chapter 11

    On the ninth day of Christmas, Rachel got out of bed very early, dressed quickly, gave Grace a bottle and put her back down, then went downstairs to find Sam still asleep on the sofa in the den.
    Good. She'd made it down here before he crept out the back door. She'd waited up for him the night before and the one before that, but he hadn't come in until very late. He was doing it again, sometimes disappearing before she woke up, sometimes coming home long after she'd gone to sleep at night.
    Not today, she vowed.
    She went to work in the kitchen, intending to have him wake to a house filled with the smell of homemade biscuits baking and bacon sizzling in a skillet. It was going to smell so good, he wouldn't be able to leave without eating, and she intended to make him do it sitting across the table from her. He couldn't ignore her sitting across the table from her. She wouldn't let him.
    It was time they got on with this. He didn't blame her for anything that happened in their past, had generously offered his forgiveness for it all, if that wasn't enough. He'd said he would have married her anyway, even without the baby, and she was trying to make herself believe it.
    He'd decided not to ask the children anything else about their mother and didn't intend to let them tell him or Rachel anything about their father. Rachel had never been prouder of him than she was in that moment. That was the man she knew, the one she'd loved for so long. A man three lost children could count on to stand by them, to help them. A man she could count on, as well. When he wasn't hell-bent on avoiding her.
    That seemed the way it had always been for her and Sam. Two steps forward, one step back. They had just been coming out of the fog of losing the baby when Rachel's grandfather had died. Two years later, her mother had died. The next year, they'd gotten involved in an adoption gone wrong. A birth mother who had changed her mind at the last minute. They'd actually seen the baby at the hospital. Rachel had held him in her arms, but they'd never been able to take him home. And then there'd been the adoption that was nothing more than a scam. A woman who'd been pregnant and promising her baby to a half-dozen couples throughout the Midwest and in the process managing to scam them out of thousands of dollars. And then there'd been Will.
    It was like they'd hardly been able to breathe between one tragedy and the next, and considering it all together, Rachel supposed it was a miracle they'd made it this far, her husband's post-Christmas plans notwithstanding.
    But they were still together. They were talking about things they'd never been able to discuss before. There was a long way to go and no guarantees of any kind regarding these children. But they had reason to hope.
    Rachel was just putting the biscuits in the oven when she thought she heard a car out front. Glancing at the clock, she couldn't imagine anyone showing up at her door this early unless...
    She hurried to the front door, afraid of finding her father or one of her sisters there, but it was Miriam climbing the porch steps.
    "Good morning," Miriam said.
    It scared her, seeing her aunt here so early, so unexpectedly. "What did you find out?" she asked.
    "About the children?"
    "Of course, about the children."
    "Nothing. Just what I told Sam yesterday. That the DNA tests showed they couldn't possibly belong to the couple in Virginia."
    "Oh."
    Miriam frowned at her. "Can I come in, Rachel? It's freezing out here."
    "Oh. Of course." Rachel stepped back and held open the door. "Sorry."
    She took Miriam's coat and led her to the kitchen, where she offered her fresh coffee, conscious of the fact that Sam was still asleep on the sofa in the family room. Which Miriam would know instantly if she took three steps down the back hallway. That was all she needed—Miriam to see that, if she hadn't heard from someone else about all that was wrong at the McRae house.
    "Sam said you'll keep the children after Christmas if I still haven't found out where they belong."
    "He told you that?"
    "Yes. I assume you'd both agreed..."
    "We had," Rachel claimed. It wasn't exactly a lie. "I just didn't know he'd told you. That's all."
    Miriam was giving her that all-knowing mother look, the one Rachel's own mother used so often. She'd claimed mothers just knew things, that one day they were going to find a gene for it on