The Lost Husband by Katherine Center

After cutting her mother loose, she hit rock bottom in a very public way: vomiting all over herself at a club. Someone captured the whole thing on an iPhone andthen posted it to YouTube. This was followed by the Spielberg debacle. Then rehab. And then the inside story: Before she could return to L.A., her grandfather had dragged her kicking and screaming back to Atwater, insisted she start taking care of his horses, and got her into therapy—with Jean.
    He expected her to run away, but she didn’t.
    And so Jean and Amber had set to work. They analyzed what success was, and fame, glamour, power, and popularity. They examined her former life from every angle, studied her motivations, wrote poems, finger-painted, meditated. They defined what really mattered in life, what made a person feel loved and happy, and what made it all worth it—and decided that fame was the exact opposite of those things. They coped with the fact that all her money had been spent, lent, and stolen by her mother’s boyfriend. And now, at last, after taking back her childhood nickname and swearing off Hollywood forever, Sunshine was finally doing fine.
    “She doesn’t look fine to me,” I said.
    Jean’s voice was protective. “You didn’t see where she started.”
    “And the ghosts thing?” I asked as I finally signaled the kids back in for breakfast.
    Jean hesitated. It was clear she felt torn: wanting to help me, but not wanting to say too much. “Well,” she said at last, “it’s possible she’s trying to reach out more to the living than to the dead.”
    I wasn’t sure exactly what Jean meant, but it made me feel better. Maybe Sunshine just wanted to be friends. Or maybe she just wanted attention. Either way, after that conversation, and witnessing how much Jean liked her, I gave in to the notion that I’d probably wind up liking her, too.

Chapter 7
 
    The next week, as I trudged up from a long afternoon in the barn, caked with goat dust, Jean met me in the yard to say she’d invited some people to dinner that night.
    “People” turned out to be Sunshine, her grandpa, and O’Connor, who Jean informed me was “always hungry.” The words had barely touched the air when an old Mercedes station wagon grumbled over the cattle guard and through the gate, then clattered along the dirt driveway and squeaked to a stop next to Jean and me.
    Jean barely had time to shrug at me before Sunshine jumped out.
    Sunshine’s grandpa, it turned out, was the white-haired fellow who had saved her in the crosswalk that first day. He took off his hat to greet me, gave me a bear hug, and introduced himself as “Russ McAllen, attorney at law.”
    That first day his hair had floated around his head in tufts, but now it was politely combed down. In the crosswalk he’d beenwearing jeans, but now he was all ironed and buttoned down in khakis and a plaid collared shirt.
    He said, “How’s the minivan?”
    I didn’t quite follow, and I replied, “Good, I think,” more as a question than an answer.
    “No new dents?” he asked, and I realized he was asking if I’d killed anybody with it since he’d seen me last. I would have assured him that all the townsfolk were unharmed, but before I could speak, he was poking a finger into my rib cage with a tickle so unexpected and jolly that it made me laugh.
    “It’s nice to see you again,” he said, putting an arm around my shoulder as we headed toward the house. “I’m glad you’re here.”
    “Isn’t that the town motto?”
    He gave me a squeeze. “Learn it and live it,” he said. “Makes a great tattoo.”
    He held a bouquet of flowers, and I pointed at them. “Nice,” I said.
    “I don’t know much,” Russ said. “But I do know women.”
    Sunshine was dressed all in black, with a baby blue ribbon in her hair. Now that I knew who she was, I couldn’t help but stare.
    It seemed like a long distance from million-dollar movie sets to Jean’s farmyard. If Amber McAllen had been standing