Sanctuary

“A few weeks.”
    “Jo Ellen, you can’t snow me.”
    They’d never been able to, Jo thought, not any of them, not from the moment Kate had set foot in Sanctuary. She’d come days after Annabelle’s desertion to spend a week and was still there twenty years later.
    They’d needed her, God knew, Jo thought, as she tried to calculate just how little she could get away with telling Katherine Pendleton. She sipped her tea, stalling.
    Kate was Annabelle’s cousin, and the family resemblance was marked in the eyes, the coloring, the physical build. But where Annabelle, in Jo’s memory, had always seemed soft and innately feminine, Kate was sharp-angled and precise.
    Yes, Kate did take care of herself, Jo agreed. She wore her hair boyishly short, a russet cap that suited her fox-at-alert face and practical style. Her wardrobe leaned toward the casual but never the sloppy. Jeans were always pressed, cotton shirts crisp. Her nails were neat and short and never without three coats of clear polish. Though she was fifty, she kept herself trim and from the back could have been mistaken for a teenage boy.
    She had come into their lives at their lowest ebb and had never faltered. Had simply been there, managing details, pushing each of them to do whatever needed to be done next, and, in her no-nonsense way, bullying and loving them into at least an illusion of normality.
    “I’ve missed you, Kate,” Jo murmured. “I really have.”
    Kate stared at her a moment, and something flickered over her face. “You won’t soften me up, Jo Ellen. You’re in trouble, and you can choose to tell me or you can make me pry it out of you. Either way, I’ll have it.”
    “I needed some time off.”
    That, Kate mused, was undoubtedly true; she could tell just from the looks of the girl. Knowing Jo, she doubted very much if it was a man who’d put that wounded look in her eyes. So that left work. Work that took Jo to strange and faraway places, Kate thought. Often dangerous places of war and disaster. Work that she knew her young cousin had deliberately put ahead of a life and a family.
    Little girl , Kate thought, my poor, sweet little girl. What have you done to yourself?
    Kate tightened her fingers on the handle of her cup to keep them from trembling. “Were you hurt?”
    “No. No,” Jo repeated and set her tea down to press her fingers to her aching eyes. “Just overwork, stress. I guess I overextended myself in the last couple of months. The pressure, that’s all.”
    The photographs. Mama.
    Kate drew her brows together. The line that formed between them was known, not so affectionately, as the Pendleton Fault Line. “What kind of pressure eats the weight off of you, Jo Ellen, and makes your hands shake?”
    Defensively, Jo clasped those unsteady hands together in her lap. “I guess you could say I haven’t been taking care of myself.” Jo smiled a little. “I’m going to do better.”
    Tapping her fingers on the arm of the chair, Kate studied Jo’s face. The trouble there went too deep to be only professional concerns. “Have you been sick?”
    “No.” The lie slid off her tongue nearly as smoothly as planned. Very deliberately she blocked out the thought of a hospital room, almost certain that Kate would be able to see it in her mind. “Just a little run-down. I haven’t been sleeping well lately.” Edgy under Kate’s steady gaze, Jo rose to dig cigarettes out of the pocket of the jacket she’d tossed over a chair. “I’ve got that book deal—I wrote you about it. I guess it’s got me stressed out.” She flicked on her lighter. “It’s new territory for me.”
    “You should be proud of yourself, not making yourself sick over it.”
    “You’re right. Absolutely.” Jo blew out smoke and fought back the image of Annabelle, the photographs. “I’m taking some time off.”
    It wasn’t all, Kate calculated, but it was enough for now. “It’s good you’ve come home. A couple of weeks of Brian’s cooking will put some meat on you again. And God knows we could use some help around here. Most of the rooms, and the cottages, are booked straight through the summer.”
    “So business is good?” Jo asked without much interest.
    “People need to get away from their own routines and pick up someone else’s. Most that come here are looking for quiet and solitude or they’d be in Hilton Head or on Jekyll. Still, they want clean linen and fresh towels.”
    Kate tapped her fingers, thinking briefly of