Shattered by Karen Robards

the name Grayson Springs revered in horse-racing circles and now empty of Grayson Springs-owned horses except for her mother's twenty-eight-year-old mare, Firefly. A host of factors, from the crashing economy in general to the savage downturn in the Thoroughbred industry in particular and including the long decline in its owner's health, had led to the present sorry state of affairs. Its horses sold off, mortgaged to the hilt, its glory days no more than a memory, Grayson Springs teetered on the edge of bankruptcy. Lisa had little hope of saving it beyond her mother's lifetime. But as long as Martha Grant breathed, Lisa would do everything in her power to keep them all in the house, the bank at bay, and the property unsold. Lisa was determined that her mother's last days, however many she had left, would be spent in the home she loved, unclouded by the knowledge that the trust funds set up to secure their futures were all but gone, casualties of bad management and the tsunami known as the Great Recession that had so recently rocked the financial world. She was fairly confident that when the farm was eventually sold, as it would have to be, it would bring enough to pay off the mortgage that had most ill-advisedly been taken out when the income had started to drop, and the other debts as well, but there would be precious little, if anything, left over. What she was going to have once her mother was gone was what she could earn for herself, and no more, which wasn't the greatest news she had ever heard but was something she could deal with. Most likely she would move back to Boston, where a lot of her law school classmates had settled and where she could reasonably hope to find work as a full-fledged attorney again rather than being stuck earning a less than adequate living as a research assistant due to the lack of jobs. In any case, until that happened she meant to do what she could to keep things going here until there was no longer any need to pretend that life was the same as it had always been. She had leased the barns and fields to a nearby Thoroughbred operation so that, from her windows, her mother saw as many horses about the place as she always had. She did her best to keep up the gardens, with their winding brick paths, where Robin Baker, the family's longtime employee, pushed Martha every pretty day in her wheelchair, and the yard and the house. If they no longer entertained lavishly, well, as far as anyone knew, that was because of her mother's health and Lisa's own disinclination. If the full-time staff had dwindled to two, they were the two Martha most counted on. Robin and her brother, their erstwhile farm manager Andy Frye, who, at sixty-six, stayed on with them as kind of a groundskeeper cum jack-of-all-trades because he had worked for Grayson Springs for most of his adult life and was, as he said, too old now to make a change, had over the years become almost family. Keeping Martha's world intact until she no longer needed it was, Lisa felt, the least she could do for the mother who had adored her all her life, and whom she adored in turn.
    I'll be sad when all this is gone . When Mother's gone . . .
    Even the thought made her throat tighten, and resolutely she pushed it away. She wasn't going to think about that. Not now. Not until she had to.
    As she pulled the Jeep up under the porte cochere and got out, a glance at the asphalt parking area just a little farther on told her that the workers were still there, repairing the damage from the tree that had come crashing into the roof of the north wing during a violent thunderstorm the previous month. They'd finished fixing the roof last week and had moved on to repairing and painting the ceiling of the bedroom the tree had lodged in. It wasn't too far from her own room, so she supposed she ought to consider herself lucky that it hadn't been hers that had been hit. The thing was, though, their homeowner's policy had a big deductible, and she was going to have to