Pursuit by Karen Robards Page B

concern. Jess took a deep breath and managed a weak smile for her mother as Judy settled the basin on her stomach.
    “Thanks.” Jess felt limp, as if the pictures in her head had taken a physical toll on her body. “And thanks for staying with me, by the way.”
    “Are you kidding? It’d take wild horses to get me out of here. After you thought somebody attacked you?” Judy made a tsk-tsk noise. “Here, let me help you with that.”
    “I can manage.”
    Making a conscious effort to keep her hands steady and her head in the present, Jess summoned another perfunctory smile and tucked her hair behind her ears and dipped the washrag in the warm water.
    “Maybe the attack was a hallucination.” Careful to keep her voice free of any inflection, Jess wrung out the rag without looking at her mother.
    The attack was real. It happened.
    But even though she was almost completely convinced of it, she didn’t say so. After listening to the TV, she was beginning to get her mind around the true enormity of what Annette Cooper’s death meant. The global scope of it. The interest in it. And the possible ramifications. Through no fault of her own, she was caught up in a world-class tragedy. As the only living witness, in fact. Not a comfortable spot to be in. And, she was becoming increasingly afraid, not a safe one.
    Whatever was going on—and she was almost positive that something she’d really rather not know about was going on—she didn’t want to get her mother—her family—involved.
    That was the thing about family, she was discovering. Having them, having people you care about, makes you so damned vulnerable.
    Annette Cooper fled the White House.
    “Whether it was a hallucination or not”—Jess, mindful of her injuries, carefully dabbed at her cheeks and chin, as Judy retrieved a hairbrush from her purse, held it up so Jess could see it, and set it on the bedside table next to the remote—“I’m not leaving this place until you do.”
    That was her mother—loyal to the bitter end. For better or for worse.
    “I love you, Mom.” It was something she almost never said anymore. None of them did.
    Her mother’s face softened. “I love you too, Jessica Rabbit.”
    It was a nickname from when she’d been a little girl, funny, so her sisters said, because their Jessica was the polar opposite of her cartoon namesake. Not sexy, not a man-eater, just plain, skinny, blind-as-a-bat bookworm Jess.
    Thanks for the confidence builder, guys. She could almost hear them answering, You’re welcome, Wabbit.
    “Look what else I’ve got.” The crinkle of tearing plastic wrap was followed by her mother waving a cheap pink toothbrush at her, then placing it and a small tube of Crest beside the hairbrush. “It’s been in my purse since the dentist gave it to me.”
    Jess’s eyes lit up. “Fantastic.”
    Judy poured her a glass of water from the yellow plastic pitcher beside the bed, and Jess quickly brushed her teeth. The minty tang of the toothpaste was so normal, so much a part of her regular, everyday life, that the very ordinariness of it felt special.
    She was suddenly, overwhelmingly, thankful to be alive. The idea of never seeing her mother and sisters again, of their grief if she had been killed along with everyone else in that car, made her throat tighten. They were a mess, every single one of them—herself included, she supposed. They could be, and frequently were, a giant pain in her ass. But in the end, she was just now discovering, none of that really mattered.
    What mattered was that they were a family.
    Annette Cooper had a family, too.
    Jess’s throat tightened again. Leaning over the basin, she splashed her face, the better to conceal incipient tears, and discovered that in some places her skin was so raw it stung.
    Ironically enough, the small discomfort banished the sudden urge to cry.
    Mrs. Cooper ran away from the Secret Service agent who came looking for her.
    “You’ve got to be exhausted,” Jess