The McRae Series 01 - Twelve Days Sam and Rachel

go, comforting herself with the fact that she still had three days until Christmas. Even if he left, he wasn't planning to go until after Christmas.
    Her whole life had been turned upside-down in the last nine days. She figured anything could happen in the next three.
    * * *
    Miriam came by after lunch. Grace was napping. Emma was in her room, and Zach and Sam had gone to town on a mysterious mission that Rachel suspected had to do with Christmas presents.
    Rachel made tea, and she and Miriam sat in the family room in front of the fire, sipping slowly. Finally Rachel asked, "What does it do to a child to be passed around from home to home, never staying anywhere for long?"
    "You mean like in foster care? Kids there want the same thing all kids want. Adults they can trust to care for them. Security. Love. They're always trying to find it. Forming attachments, hoping, worrying. Break those bonds too many times, and it makes it that much harder for them to form those kinds of bonds again."
    "Into adulthood?"
    "Yes. Think about it. If you'd seen every bit of security you'd ever had yanked away from you time and time again, what would you want most of all?"
    "All those things," she said. Hadn't she loved Sam enough? How could he not see how much she'd loved him?
    "And what would you do, if you'd grown up that way and you wanted to protect yourself from ever being hurt again?"
    "I'd put up a wall between me and everyone else. And I'd try to never let anyone that close to me. I'd pull inside myself and try not to get hurt again." That was it. Rachel knew. She'd thought so many times he just didn't care when he'd been desperately trying to protect himself.
    Oh, Sam.
    "Want to tell me what's going on?" Miriam asked.
    "Sam's parents didn't die right before he came here. They died about ten years before, and I guess he got passed from house to house after that. Relatives. Foster homes. I'm not sure exactly."
    She looked up to find an expression on her aunt's face that she'd seldom seen. The one she'd worn the day she came to tell them Will had to go back to his mother. In her job, Miriam knew too much, saw too much. There must have been more days than her aunt cared to remember when she'd been the one taking a child from one home to another, one more time. When she'd taken children out of horrendous situations and likely been unable to forget them, unable to sleep at night for wondering what was going to become of them. Miriam knew what Sam's life had been like. She knew kids who'd been Sam.
    "What do I do?" Rachel asked, afraid of what her answer might be.
    "He never told you?"
    "No. He told Emma."
    "Oh, Rachel. All these years..."
    "I know." She'd been married to him, and she hadn't truly known him. She couldn't help but believe she'd failed him completely, and she wanted to make it up to him, if she could. "What do I do?"
    "Get him to talk about it. If not to you, to someone. I have the name of a great psychologist in the next county."
    "I can't see Sam ever talking to a stranger about this."
    "He has to talk to someone. If he's kept it a secret from you all these years, I doubt he's ever talked to anyone about it, and you know what holding things inside of you that way can do to a person."
    "Yes." They were so good at that, her and Sam. "I don't know how I can get him to talk about it. And I was wondering if you could find out about what happened to Sam? It would be in the social services records, wouldn't it?"
    "Rachel, those are private."
    "I know. But he's my husband."
    "And those records are private," her aunt said firmly.
    "Okay. I'm sorry. I just thought..." She was married to the man. She thought she had a right to know.
    "I think you and I should start with what's going on now. Like why he's sleeping on the sofa?"
    "I guess things just got too hard for us—all the bad stuff—until we were drowning in it. It was all I could do just to try to keep going. I didn't even see what it was doing to him. I don't even know if he wants to be here anymore."
    "But he is still here," Miriam pointed out.
    "I'm afraid he won't be for long. I don't know how to get him to stay."
    "You start by telling him how you feel."
    "We've been doing better. But there's so much. How can you be married to a man for twelve years and have left so much unsaid?"
    "Say it now. If he's still here, he's still interested in hearing it."
    "I want to tell him. I want to make him happy." And then she got to the scariest part of all. "I'm afraid he's never