Continued from yesterday’s post, The Cowboy’s Baby Prologue.
In the morning the community of Creighton was combing the fields of the Lennon estate, whole lines of neighbors and police stretched across Cassie’s land while a doctor’s drugs restrained Cassie to her bedroom. She put David clearly out of her mind. It was Joseph everyone wanted to find, a blue-eyed, smiling, pudgy child not even a year old, lost. They found nothing. But as the days of fruitless searching bled into weeks of frustration, Cassie remembered that it wasn’t smart to forget about David. She began making lists.
Over the months the police used the lists. David hadn’t quit his totally unnecessary job, he just never went back. The paycheck was eventually voided; Cassie didn’t need the money and didn’t want to see the name David J. Lennon written as if it were an important name to her.
“But darlin’,”advised her lawyer. “He had better be important to you or you might never get little Joseph back. You need to make thinking about David Lennon your top priority.”
He hesitated, not wanting to say it.
“Of course,you need to get well, too. I don’t think you’ve seen anything but law officers and doctors and your own house since David left.”
He deliberately omitted a reference to her prolonged hospital stay.
“Come on over tomorrow and have supper with us,” he said. She didn’t. 
TO BE CONTINUED. Copyright by Gretchen Rix
WHAT I READ THIS WEEK: The One In My Heart by Sherry Thomas.
Photos by Roxanne Rix