He shoved her towards the brightly lit meeting house and turned to face their attacker. “Don’t ask, just run!”The shadowy figure lunged, and Dale leapt back. He stumbled over a tree root, kicked out blindly and connected, feeling a spurt of surprise when the other man went down with a grunt and didn’t get up.“Whaddid you do that for, boy?” The boozy voice rose up from the ground, and Dale’s gut soured at the smell of cheap beer and cheaper gin.He stepped back quickly and bumped into Tansy. “I told you to run,” he snapped, his voice harsh with anger and embarrassment.“I wanted to make sure you were okay,” she said quietly, crouching down beside the drunk. She raised her voice. “Trask? It’s Dr. Whitmore. Tansy. Can you stand?”Leave him there, Dale wanted to say. This is his problem, not ours. But it saddened him to think that his uncle, a man he’d once idolized, had crawled into a bottle the day after his wife’s death and still hadn’t emerged, fifteen years later.If that’s what love did to a man, then Dale wanted no part of the emotion.“Come on,”
