Tall trees with bare branches slept with nature's blessing until it was time to once again produce the multitude of leaves that would provide welcomed shade during the hot, muggy Virginia summer that was months away.
There was a stillness to the night, an aura of peacefulness, as those in the majestic old homes slept beneath puffy eiderdowns and marshmallow-soft blankets.
But in one house a light shone behind the curtains of an upstairs window. The glow was dimmed by a fleeting shadow that disappeared, then reappeared. Back and forth, there, then gone, then back again in a slow, steady rhythm.
Inside the quiet room Harrison Parker paced, a deep frown on his face, one hand hooked over the back of his neck as he attempted and failed to find answers to the multitude of questions beating against his beleaguered mind.
With a sigh he sank onto the old leather chair behind the desk in the office he'd created in one of the spare bedrooms. He glanced at the clock on the desk and shook his head.
One-fifteen in the morning, Harrison thought. He had to go to bed and get some sleep, but dreaded the image of tossing and turning, dozing and waking, then facing the new day just as exhausted as he had been the day before and the one before that.
"Ah, hell," he said, leaning his head back on the top of the chair and staring at the ceiling. "What am I doing wrong? Nothing I try is working. Nothing."
Nine months, he thought. It had been nine long months since his wife, Lisa, had been struck by a drunk driver as she'd been driving home. She'd been killed instantly, they had told him, hadn't suffered. She had simply ceased to exist, was gone. Forever.
Nine months. And for eight of those months, Harrison knew, he'd functioned in a fog of grief and pain, burying himself in his work so he could buffer the loneliness, anger and self-pity. For eight months he'd been vaguely aware of his three children, listening to them but not hearing what they were saying, seeing them but not comprehending what they needed from him, talking to them but not remembering moments later what he had said.
He'd placed his David, Chelsey and Benny in the care of a nanny, then escaped from the tears echoing within the walls of this house that used to ring with the sound of laughter.
The nannies quit, one after another, stating they couldn't control his defiant children who refused to follow directives and were totally out of control. Rather than address the issues, he'd simply hire another victim, who would last a few weeks, then flee.
Then a little over a month ago, Harrison mused on, the nanny informed him, as he handed over her last check, that his youngest son, four-year-old Benny, had thrown a tantrum and broken a dozen knickknacks that had belonged to his mother. Even worse, Benny often went days at a time without speaking, a horrifying fact that Harrison hadn't even noticed.
"Father of the Year, that's me," Harrison said aloud, then dragged his hands down his beard-roughened face.
He'd dragged himself out of his mental and emotional pit of despair, quit his job as the top computer expert at the prestigious corporation where he'd climbed steadily to the top of the ladder, and set about opening his own computer consulting business at home.
He would take care of his brokenhearted children. He would repair the damage he'd done to them by ignoring their grief as he'd wallowed in his own. He would turn them back into the vibrant, happy kids they had been, and they'd get on with their lives, move forward. Without Lisa. Somehow.
"Yeah, right," Harrison said, a weary edge to his voice. "And what a helluva fine job you've done in the past month, Parker. Progress ... zip, nada, none."
Ten-year-old David was sullen and rebellious and informed his father at least once a day that he hated him. Seven-year-old Chelsey was sucking her thumb, which she hadn't done since she was in diapers. And Benny? If he said six words from the time he got up until he went to bed at night it was a red-letter day.
His family couldn't go on like this, Harrison thought, pushing himself to his feet. He'd lost his wife, and he was slowly but surely losing his kids despite all his efforts to make them feel safe and loved and ...
"Sleep," he said, turning off the lamp on the desk.
"I need sleep. Tomorrow - well, today - is Saturday and we'll do something fun together. Yeah. That's the ticket. Fun. I'm an intelligent, thirty-three-yearold man, for cripe sake. I can do this. I just have to figure out how and I will. Damn it, I will."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Parker Project by Joan Pickart Copyright © 2004 by Harlequin Enterprises, Ltd.. Excerpted by permission.
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