Free The Color of Hope (The Color of Heaven Series) by Julianne MacLean Page A

and we spent the next portion of the evening comparing notes about our favorite foods, movies, and music.
    Lingering over dessert and coffee, we shared stories from our childhoods and talked about our first crushes. Nadia told me about how she and her mother were homeless for a while. Then she described her mother’s illness, and how the final weeks had been painful and difficult.
    Before we knew it, the restaurant was closing down, and it was time to leave. But I didn’t want to.

Chapter Twenty-six
    I T WASN ’ T EASY saying good-bye to Nadia after dinner. I stood on the sidewalk and watched her walk away from me, toward the subway. I wondered if that’s what I looked like from behind when I walked at a brisk pace in heels. It was an unusual vantage point, to see yourself from such an angle.
    But she wasn’t actually me, I reminded myself. She just looked like me. We were not the same person. We were two unique individuals with very different life experiences.
    When I arrived home, Rick was lying on the sofa, his tie loose about his neck, his legs crossed at the ankles. There was a baseball game on the large flat screen television, but Rick was texting on his phone. He glanced up and set it on the coffee table when I locked the door behind me.
    “How did it go?” he asked, sitting up. “I’ve been thinking about you all night.”
    I shrugged out of my blazer and draped it over the back of one of the kitchen stools, then poured myself a glass of ice water from the spout on the fridge.
    “It was unbelievable,” I told him. “I still can’t believe this is happening. I just had dinner with a twin sister I never knew I had, yet I feel like I’ve known her all my life.”
    “So it wasn’t awkward or anything?”
    “Not at all,” I replied. “Well, maybe there were a few awkward moments, because she’s had a hard life, and I feel kind of guilty about that.”
    I moved into the living room and sat down beside him.
    “Why?” he asked, massaging my shoulder. “It’s not your fault.”
    I sipped my water. “I don’t know. I guess I feel like I was the lucky one – lucky to be adopted into such an amazing family. When I was growing up, I never felt deprived. If I sensed something was missing, it had to be on a subconscious level, because I had such abundance in my life. But Nadia was born with a heart defect, so she wasn’t adopted until she was four. She has no memory of the first four years of her life, which she spent in foster homes. Later, her dad was an alcoholic, and abusive. He left when she was nine.”
    “Geez, that is rough,” Rick said.
    “Yeah. But it gets worse. He stopped paying child support, so she and her mother got evicted from their apartment and had to live in their car for a while. They drove out here to live with Nadia’s grandparents, but that didn’t work out too well either. They ended up on the street again, living out of their car until her mother met some guy who let them live at his place. Nadia said he was really nice but not very handsome, and that her mother was just using him for a place to live.”
    Rick continued to knead my shoulders. “She should write a novel.”
    “Tell me about it. So you can see why I would feel guilty.” I closed my eyes and tried to relax while he used the pads of his thumbs to rub in circular motions down the length of my back.
    “But it’s more than that,” I continued. “When I imagine her in any of those situations, alone and frightened, I feel a pain in my gut, and it makes me want to double over in agony. How could this have been happening to her while I was living a perfect life, not far away? I wish I had a time machine, so I could go back and tell my parents that she was out there in the world, and in trouble. They would have rescued her, without a doubt. I hate that we didn’t know. It makes me want to sue the crap out of someone.”
    “Too bad the agency went bankrupt,” he said.
    “Yeah.”
    His hands moved up to my