Still, when she and her mother were gossiping in the kitchen and Mrs. Edge caught herself for the third time mentioning either Ross or Julia and then lapsed into an uncomfortable silence, Milla sighed. “Mom, I don’t expect you to never mention them. Talk about them if you want; I’d like to hear what the kids are up to, keep up to date on what’s happening.”
Mrs. Edge sighed, too. “I just wish you three would settle things between you. I hate not having you here for the holidays.”
“Maybe someday, after I find Justin. Though I doubt I’ll ever completely forgive them for saying I should just forget about him.”
Her mother’s eyes filled with tears. “Oh, honey . . . Do you still really think you’ll ever find him? I don’t see how it’s possible.”
“I’ll find him,” she said fiercely. It hurt that her mother had given up, too. Was Milla the only one who still hoped? “I have leads now that I didn’t have before. I know he was flown out of Mexico, probably to New Mexico. I know a woman falsified a birth certificate for him. I know the name of the men who stole him from me. One of them is dead, but the other one—” She stopped. Without Diaz, her chances of finding Pavón had dwindled alarmingly. But maybe that’s what Diaz was doing: tracking. It was what he did best.
Mrs. Edge looked stunned. “You—you’ve actually found out all that? Just recently? I know you haven’t said anything when you called.”
“Within the last month.” She felt ashamed that she hadn’t called her parents in over a month, at least. There was no excuse, no matter how busy she was. “Things have been”—she searched for a word that was accurate but unalarming—“hectic.”
“I imagine so.” Mrs. Edge glanced at the thin red scar on her daughter’s throat. “How did you get that scar?”
Self-consciously Milla touched the scar. It wasn’t a bad scar at all, and in time would probably fade completely. She doubted her mother would appreciate that little detail. “From a cut,” she finally said.
“I see. You were shaving?”
Milla smiled appreciatively, then gave up. “No. A woman did it. She was part of the smuggling ring; she took care of the babies who’d been kidnapped, until they could be flown out of the country.”
Mrs. Edge sat down hard in the nearest chair. Her cheeks were pale at the thought of her youngest being attacked, yet at the same time she was almost beside herself at the other news. “She—she saw Justin? She actually saw him? She remembered him?”
“She remembered. He was alive. He was okay.”
“She—but why did she cut you?”
“Because I did something stupid.” Trying to attack Lola had been very stupid, but she’d been blinded by emotion, the same way she had been in the cemetery when she’d first crossed paths with Diaz. Scolding herself hadn’t worked; she’d done exactly the same thing again, and this last time she hadn’t come out of it unscathed. She was good at several things, but evidently fighting wasn’t one of them.
“Stupid, how?”
“I jumped her.” Milla made a helpless gesture. “I was just so angry at her, I couldn’t help it. She had a knife.”
“You could have been killed!”
She could have been killed numerous times in the past ten years. Thank heavens, her mother had no idea of the type of places she had gone into, the people she had talked to, the things she’d done. She supposed she was lucky she hadn’t been shot, beaten, or raped, but her personal safety had somehow never mattered. Her guardian angels must have been working overtime—that was the only reason she could come up with for none of those things having happened.
And if Diaz hadn’t been there in Juarez, Milla had no doubt Lola would have sliced her throat from ear to ear, just because she could. Diaz was the most unlikely guardian angel she could imagine, but he’d served the purpose.
She’d come to Indiana so she could stop thinking about him for a while, but every subject seemed to bring her right back to him. It was almost like having a painful adolescent crush, she decided, though she’d escaped her teenager years largely unscathed. Maybe if she’d gone through the usual emotional upheaval then, she wouldn’t be so hung up on Diaz now. He was the ultimate bad boy, she was in lust, and she needed to forget about him and concentrate on more important things.
“What are you thinking about?” her mother asked suspiciously. “You got the most peculiar expression on your face. Has something like that happened before, and you didn’t tell me about it?”
“What? Oh, no—no. Nothing like that. I was actually thinking how lucky I’d been that nothing had happened before.”
“Lucky? You mean you’ve done things that—”
“I mean I’ve been in some really rough places, trying to find someone who knew anything about the baby smugglers. I never go alone, though,” she hastened to add. “Never.”
“That’s something, at least.” Mrs. Edge blew out a shaky breath. “But how I’ll sleep at night now knowing you make a habit of doing things like that, I don’t know.”
“I guess that’s why I haven’t told you before,” Milla said, feeling guilty. There was nothing like a visit with your parents to make you feel twelve years old again.
A car pulled into the driveway, and Mrs. Edge got to her feet, peering out the kitchen window to see who it was. She gave a small gasp of dismay. “It’s Julia. What on earth? I told her you were here.”