Horizon (03) by Sophie Littlefield

and after cleaning up the kitchen she got all the children to lie down for a nap, even Dane, who was not much of a sleeper these days. When she was sure they were all out, she lay down between Ruthie and Dirk, thinking she would just close her eyes for a moment, perhaps catch fifteen minutes’ rest before one of the children woke her up.
    But images of the morning’s discovery kept her awake. Bubbles had risen to the surface of the water after the Beater went under. Was it possible that she had imagined the other—the sudden paddling of its hands?
    The sound of the front door opening yanked Cass out of her thoughts. She scrambled to her feet and smoothed her clothes. There was already enough trouble between her and the other moms without them thinking she wasn’t doing her part with the children. She picked up the closest book—one of the historical romances Suzanne liked—and put her finger between the pages so it would look like she’d been reading, and sat in the recliner.
    Ingrid came into the room, followed by Jay Swarmer, who headed up the security rotation, guarding the bridge and dragging away dead Beaters from the shore. His presence here, in the middle of the day, caused an uneasy cramp in Cass’s stomach. As for Ingrid, her onetime friend’s lips were set in a thin line and twin red spots stood out on her cheeks, and she refused to meet Cass’s gaze.
    “What’s going on?” Cass said quietly. Getting no answer other than grim looks, she set the book down on the coffee table. “Let’s talk in the kitchen so we don’t wake the kids.”
    “I’ll stay with them,” Ingrid said primly. She settled herself cross-legged on the floor, the long wool skirt she wore draped over her muddy boots.
    Cass followed Jay wordlessly into the kitchen, wondering if she should offer him some of the cold tea left over from the morning. They’d all grown accustomed to drinking it cold; though the cooks kept a fire going through most of the day, the hearth was usually in service for one task or another, everything from slow-cooking rabbits on a spit, to baking flat breads, to boiling river water to purify it. There was no time for heating tea or leftovers, barely even for warming one’s hands over the flames.
    But Jay spoke before she had a chance. “This is a hell of a thing, Cass.”
    She was surprised at the approbation in his voice. He leaned back against the counter, his jeans slung low under a gut that had been slowly disappearing ever since Cass had known him. No matter how much kaysev a person ate, it wasn’t enough to make or keep them fat. Even Fat Mike was lean these days, though the nickname stuck.
    “What do you mean?”
    Jay winced, closing his eyes for a moment as if the conversation pained him. “Sammi’s been to see me.”
    Cass set a hand on the back of a kitchen chair to support herself as she absorbed this fresh bad news. Sammi had told. Despite Cass’s deep anguish over hurting Dor’s daughter, she had never considered that Sammi would want revenge against her. But of course, Cass would be much easier to hurt than her father. Their affair didn’t go against any of New Eden’s covenants, and there were those who might even admire him for keeping a couple of women in play…but Cass had trouble fitting into New Eden from the start and this would only make people that much more reluctant to befriend her—
    “She told us all about it. How she’d had her suspicions, about how people were talking.”
    Somehow the knowledge that Sammi suspected the affair troubled Cass even more. Would that have been enough—would knowing that they were hurting her have been enough to make them stop? Cass hoped the answer was yes, but there would be no way to know now.
    “Look, I know we messed up. But I never meant to, to hurt anyone. We just, it was private, it—”
    “‘We’?” Jay’s gray eyebrows, thick and untrimmed, knitted together in consternation. “Who’s we? ”
    They stared at each other for