Free The Lies We Told by Diane Chamberlain Page B

who was on vacation. Someone else could have covered for him—someone who hadn’t miscarried a couple of weeks ago.
    “I need to stay busy,” Maya said. “You know how I am.”
    She did know. Work had always been Maya’s way of coping. Even after their parents’ deaths, when their lives had been turned completely upside down, Maya threw herself into her schoolwork. Her teachers and the school counselor had been astounded. Maya had always been a good student, the type who didn’t have to study all that hard to do well, something Rebecca had envied since she’d had to cram to get the same grades. But after their parents’ deaths, Maya lost herself completely in her studies, graduating from high school in three years instead of four. Everyone talked about how amazing she was. No one paid much attention to the fact that Rebecca had sacrificed her own first year of college to play mother and father to her sister, or that she’d fought the system to keep Maya out of foster care or that she’d cooked and cleaned and done the laundry while Maya rose to the top of her class.
    The thing that really changed about Maya after the murders,though, was her transformation from a happy-go-lucky kid into a girl afraid of her own shadow. Totally understandable. She’d been right in the line of fire. Who could go through something like that and remain unchanged?
    Rebecca closed the book on the Chinese earthquake, giving up. She hadn’t absorbed a single word in the past fifteen minutes. Swallowing the last of her Americano, she got to her feet. She’d go for a run. Lose the negative memories.
    She left the store and headed for her car, walking quickly as though she could leave the memories behind, but it wasn’t so easy. The whole time she and Maya had been talking the night before, Rebecca had been thinking about the shooting in the restaurant. She hated guns, hated treating gunshot victims, although she did it, wanting to save their lives with a desperation that went beyond the simple practice of medicine. Two decades had passed, yet she still saw her parents’ bloodied bodies in every shooting victim she treated.
    The incident in the Brazilian restaurant had to remind Maya of that night. Rebecca had seen the panic in her eyes. She’d still been trembling later, when Rebecca hugged her good-night. They never talked about their parents’ murder. It was an agreed-upon, unspoken rule between them. Yet she knew that Maya had to blame her for that night.
    Maybe even more than she blamed herself.

11
Maya
    “H OLY SHIT , M AYA ,” A DAM CALLED FROM THE SOFA IN THE family room. “Come look at this.”
    I closed the dishwasher and walked into the family room. Outside the windows, the rain created a dark, undulating curtain so thick I couldn’t see the woods behind the house. It was eight o’clock, so I wasn’t sure how much of the darkness was encroaching nightfall and how much of it was the storm. Either way, it was the sort of weather that made me glad to be inside. Chauncey sat at the sliding glass door, looking discouraged.
    Adam pointed toward the TV. “They’re in Wilmington,” he said. “They’re saying now it’s a category four.”
    I sat down on the sofa next to him. On the screen, a newscaster dressed in a slicker and hood held on to a lamppost to keep from flying away. He was trying to shield his eyes against the wind and rain, shouting to be heard above the din. I squinted at the TV. “Is he…where is he?” I asked. Wilmington was less than three hours from us, and I loved the charm of the city on the Cape Fear River. “Is that the Riverwalk?”
    “Right,” Adam said. “He’s near the Pilot House. Listen.”
    “…not moving,” the reporter said. “Just sitting at the mouth of the Cape Fear. There’s no one out here on the downtown streets, but most people didn’t evacuate. Some were starting to, because the next storm, Erin, is expected to make a direct hit. And that’s a problem—” He slapped