A Time To Forgive. Darlene Gardner

sat patiently through the introductions. The only lawyer who mattered, in his opinion, was State’s Attorney Douglas Benton. A tall man with a head of prematurely gray hair, Benton was a descendant of the town’s founding father. Murders weren’t common in sleepy Laurel County, nestled in the state’s southwest corner less than an hour’s drive from the nation’s capital, but the state’s attorney had a reputation for being as tough as a piece of white Maryland marble.

      Judge Hodgkins shuffled some papers, then peered over his reading glasses. “I understand that the parties involved have reached a satisfactory plea agreement. I’ve reviewed the signed document. I gather you’re ready to proceed with a plea hearing and disposition. Is that correct?”

      Douglas Benton stood. “That is correct.”

      The bottom dropped out of Connor’s stomach as a murmur of excitement rushed through the crowd. A plea agreement? He turned to his mother and whispered, “How could this happen? Did you know about this?”

      She stared at him, her face white, her eyes teary. Before she could answer, Judge Hodgkins pounded the desk with his gavel. “Order. Order.”

      The murmuring died down and Connor watched with growing horror as Judge Hodgkins proceeded through a series of questions meant to make sure Galloway understood what he had signed. Finally, the judge reached the heart of the plea.

      “This agreement specifies that you, Mr. Galloway, are pleading guilty to second-degree murder. It further states that the length of your sentence of incarceration should be twenty years, the first ten without the possibility of parole.”

      The blood rushing through Connor’s body turned icy as the gallery erupted with shouts and angry murmurings. Twenty years, the judge had said. A chance at parole after ten. Galloway could be out on the streets as early as age twenty-eight. He would not rot in prison. But J.D. was already rotting in his grave.

      The judge banged the gavel once more. “Order. Or I’ll have the bailiff clear the courtroom.”

      Connor stared at his brother’s killer. Something that had been coiled in Connor’s gut unfurled, like the body of a snake venturing from the sunlight to the shadows. It reached out to every part of him, thick and sour and filling.

      The emotion was so alien that Connor couldn’t identify it until it wrapped around his heart and dipped into his very soul.

      Then he knew, with sudden and vicious clarity, what had cloaked his world in darkness and blackened his heart.

      It was hate.

      CHAPTER ONE

      Nearly ten years later

      CONNOR SMITH HAD SPENT the last decade attempting to outrun the past, but it caught up with him. Again.

      The pattern was as familiar as the long, straight rows of gravestones in a cemetery. Just when he thought he’d relegated J.D.’s murder to a terrible memory and started to live in the present, something happened to pull him back into the abyss.

      The latest something was his niece, Jaye, an unusually pretty little girl with pale blond hair swept back from the widow’s peak on her high forehead and gray-green eyes that were reminiscent of his dead brother’s. She’d got her first name from J.D., too.

      The girl sat on a stool at the counter-height island in the kitchen nook of his Silver Spring town house picking at the piece of toast and jam he’d fixed her. Her skinny, nine-year-old legs dangled well above the porcelain-tile floor.

      He stood between the island and the state-of-the-art black microwave that was built into his golden-maple cabinets, cradling his second cup of black coffee of the morning and waiting for a bagel to defrost.

      On an ordinary Saturday morning, he’d already be at the office figuring out how to make one of his clients money. But there was nothing routine about a morning in which his sister chose to abandon her daughter.

      “Where’s Mom?” Jaye asked.

      There it was, the question Connor had been dreading. The microwave beeped, signaling that the bagel had thawed.

      He ignored the summons and kneaded the throbbing space between his brows. He’d found his sister Diana’s note more than an hour ago but still hadn’t figured out how to break the news to Jaye that her mother had taken off for God only knew where.

      “She’s gone, isn’t she?” Jaye asked abruptly in a hard voice that didn’t sound as if it belonged to a child.

      “Yeah, she’s gone,” Connor said softly, futilely wishing he could soften the blow. “I think she needed to be by herself for a while.”

      He expected Jaye to dissolve into tears, the way he imagined any young girl would react upon hearing that her mother had cast her off and left her with an uncle who was essentially a stranger.

      Jaye’s chin quivered slightly, but her eyes were dry, her petal of a mouth pinched. “What’s going to happen to me?”

      That was the question that had been swirling around and around in his brain since he’d read Diana’s note. She’d claimed she’d be in touch but made no promises about when she’d be back for Jaye. He doubted it would be any time soon.

      Diana had nearly jumped out of her skin every time he’d asked her a question last night. He’d recognized that something was wrong, but had unwisely decided to wait until this morning to confront her about it.

      He swallowed his anger at his sister and focused on the sad girl with the hard eyes. “Your mother left a note asking me to take care of you.”

      How, he wondered, had Diana managed to look after Jaye for this long? She’d given birth less than a year after J.D.’s murder, when she was barely seventeen. She’d had sex with so many boys, she said, that she couldn’t figure out who the father was. Their parents, still drowning in grief over J.D.’s death, hadn’t been able to deal with a new blow.

      After arguing bitterly with their mother, Diana had run off. Connor had spent a night and a day looking for her before their great-aunt Aggie had called to say that Diana had turned up at her house outside Roanoke in southwest Virginia.

      There Diana had stayed for the next four years until Aunt Aggie’s death, when she’d cashed in her meager inheritance and simply taken off with Jaye. She’d called now and then to let the family know she was alive but hadn’t resurfaced until last night at ten o’clock when she rang the doorbell at his town house.

      And now she was gone—again—but this time she’d left her daughter behind.

      “My mom said I have a grandma,” Jaye continued, still in that tough, cold voice. “Maybe I should stay with her.”

      “No,” Connor said. His mother could barely take care of herself, let alone a granddaughter. His father, re-married and living in Richmond, was only a slightly better choice. All his energy went to his second wife and their young son.

      “Then where am I going to stay?” Jaye asked.

      He looked around at the interior of his pricey three-story town house, which a maid cleaned twice a week until it sparkled. It was no place for a child, and he was a poor choice for a guardian.

      He worked upwards of sixty hours a week at a high-powered brokerage firm in Washington, D.C., where he was so well regarded he’d recently been fielding offers from Wall Street. The rest of his waking hours, he spent at the gym or on the bar and restaurant scene with his girlfriend, Isabel Pennington, who’d been making noises about moving in with him.

      He didn’t know anything about raising a child, especially one he wouldn’t have recognized as his niece until a few hours ago.

      Though, for the moment, there was no other option. He was it.

      He swallowed the lump of trepidation in his throat and strived to make himself sound self-assured. “I already told you that I’m going to take care of you. So you’ll stay here. With me.”