Free The Lies We Told by Diane Chamberlain

that restaurant that you wouldn’t want to go,” she said. “I know you don’t like going to that part of town. But it seemed great at first. We were having so much fun. And then this had to happen.” She shook her head. “It was terrible.”
    “I’m okay,” I said.
    Rebecca looked toward Brent’s car, then faced me again. “We haven’t had a chance to talk about the baby since I got back. I mean, you and me alone. Let’s make time before I end up on the road again, okay?”
    I wasn’t thinking about the baby at that moment. I didn’t want thoughts of my baby—my son —to be connected in any way to this horrible night, but she was waiting for some response from me. “Okay,” I said. “I really…” I looked toward my house once more, thinking of Adam inside. “We have to figure out whether to try again.”
    “Or adopt.”
    I shook my head. “I don’t think Adam ever will.”
    “What is his problem? ” She sounded annoyed. “I want to pound some sense into that man’s head.”
    “No. Don’t. He and I have to figure it out. Okay?”
    Rebecca ran a hand through her short hair, glancing again toward Brent’s car. “This is a terrible send-off for Brent,” she said, “but then, you get kind of used to the unexpected when you work for DIDA.” It was the wrong thing to say to me now that Adam had signed on as a volunteer, and she caught herself. “But nothing like this has ever happened in all the years I’ve worked for DIDA,” she said. “Really, Maya.”
    I didn’t want to talk about DIDA. What I wanted to say was, Did tonight remind you of the night Mom and Daddy were killed? But I would never say those words. Our relationship was so complex. We were close in so many ways. Distant in others. If tonight had reminded her of that other night, I would never know.
    “You get some sleep,” she said. “Do you have some Xanax lying around?”
    “Somewhere,” I said.
    She touched my cheek with the back of her fingers, the way a mother might touch her child. She was not usually tender, and I was moved by the gesture. Then she pulled me into a hug.
    “I love you,” she said.
    “I love you, too.”
    We stayed that way, holding on to each other, for close to a minute. No matter how tightly I held her against me though, I felt that long-ago night wedged between us like a solid wall of stone.

10
Rebecca
    R EBECCA SAT IN HER FAVORITE RED VELVET CHAIR AT Starbucks, shoes off, feet tucked beneath her, a double Americano on the table next to her. She was reading a book written by a guy who’d worked with the Red Cross after the quake in China. Even though she’d worked in China after the quake herself, she couldn’t concentrate on the book today. She was impatient and the coffee wasn’t helping.
    The devastation from the earthquake in Ecuador was much worse than anyone had realized, and she was itching to go down there. Brent had been working thirty miles from the epicenter for a week now, and he’d finally managed to call her on a satellite phone the day before. “Tell Dot we need you here,” he’d said. They were extremely shorthanded, but Dorothea didn’t want her to go.
    “Not until we see what these devils in the Atlantic have on their minds,” she said when Rebecca relayed Brent’s message.
    The tropical storm that had been wallowing a good distance off the coast of Bermuda was now Hurricane Carmen. Shebarely deserved the name hurricane, in Rebecca’s opinion. She was nothing more than a puffy white amoeba on the weather map. No one seemed sure where she would make landfall—if she made landfall at all. Possibly South Carolina. Possibly farther north, along the Outer Banks. But the storm was so pathetic that evacuation was voluntary, and Rebecca knew that most people would stay to watch the waves swell and the wind howl and enjoy being as close as they could get to danger while remaining perfectly safe. Durham and the rest of the state were promised buckets of rain and a little