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difference betweenher cellular calls and this one. She’d had no intention of telling him everything, but now she had no choice.
    â€œI’m not using my cellular phone,” she said quietly. “I’m…calling from the hospital.”
    â€œYou’re in the hospital! Maddie, you said a ‘little’ accident. What really happened?”
    After a heavy sigh, Maddie related the fall she and Fanny had taken. “I have no idea what caused it, but there it is. Apparently Fanny wasn’t injured, but the medics took me to the hospital. I can’t be too bad off because I’m being discharged sometime today. That’s the whole truth.”
    â€œExcept for what the doctor told you to do.”
    â€œMark, I can’t do nothing for a whole month!”
    â€œYou could if you were under my roof. Look, why don’t you put Fanny in a good stable, leave your truck and trailer in a safe place—I’m sure a city the size of Austin has rental spaces available for RVs and such—and fly home? I hate the thought of you limping around that little trailer you live in and trying to fix yourself something to eat. With one hand yet. And surely you’re not thinking of taking care of Fanny yourself. Maddie, it’s just not sensible for you to stay in Texas.”
    He was making sense, and Maddie’s resolve to take care of herself was weakening. But fly to Montana and leave Fanny in Texas? No way, Maddie thought, and avoided that topic entirely by asking, “Mark, are you sure Darcy wouldn’t mind? You have to think of her first now, you know.”
    â€œI know Darcy wouldn’t mind. She’s a very special lady, Maddie. So, have I convinced you? Are you coming home?”
    â€œI…guess so.”
    â€œGreat! Phone me with your flight schedule.”
    â€œIt’ll probably be a few days before you hear from me. It will take, uh, some time to do everything here that will need, uh, doing before I can leave.” She wasn’t exactly lying to thebrother she adored, she told herself. She simply wasn’t telling him everything she was thinking and planning.
    â€œThat’s fine. Just call when you know something.”
    â€œBye, Mark.”
    â€œBye, Maddie. Take care.”
    Maddie hung up and, completely done in, she closed her eyes and wished with all her heart that she would fall asleep in spite of the pain racking her body.
    She really shouldn’t have phoned Mark, she thought hazily, because now she had to go home to Montana, and she was not going by herself. She wouldn’t leave Fanny behind for all the oil in Texas, which Mark would have thought of if he hadn’t immediately started worrying about Maddie’s condition instead of looking at the whole picture.
    â€œThe hits just keep on coming,” Maddie whispered while wondering how on earth she was going to manage to drive fifteen hundred miles when she could just barely move without pain medication, which she certainly couldn’t take and then do any driving.

Chapter Two
    C hecking out of the hospital took hours, most of that time spent in waiting. Maddie waited for someone from administration to do the paperwork, then waited for her prescriptions to be filled by the hospital pharmacy. Her final wait was for a nurse to come to her room to instruct her on home care of her abrasions.
    By then Maddie was hurting so much that when a runner delivered her prescriptions in the middle of the nurse’s instructions, Maddie immediately tried to get a pain pill from its container. She couldn’t use her right hand, of course, and she simply wasn’t adept with her left, especially when it was trembling from the burning, stinging pain raging all along her right side.
    The nurse took the bottle from her, opened it and shook out one pill into Maddie’s outstretched hand. “Let me tell you something about pain,” the woman said while Maddie swallowed the pill with