Chapter Fifty
“I’m Jessica Shupe, the court-appointed guardian for Ryley McCafferty.”
Maggie was on her knees in the winter garden with a handful of weeds no one had cleared during the fall now piled on the ground beside her. She jumped up and wiped the dirt from her hands on her torn blue jeans. Her heart sank a little more as she glanced at her stained sweatshirt, one of the comfortable, unpresentable ones she reserved for yard work, never for entertaining.
Maggie struggled to find something to ease her anxiety and calm her rattled brain—to explain to this woman that she didn’t always look like this. Because this lady not only hadn’t called first, which Maggie suspected was meant to rattle her, but also gazed at Maggie as if she were a nobody.
Maggie extended her trembling hand out t
