Free Surprise Me by Deena Goldstone Page A

dress, which has all but disappeared in the light and the breeze from the back door. His breath catches and he has to wait a minute before he can say, “Isabelle…” And she turns around and looks at him. “The pages—they’re very good.”
    She nods, taking it in. “That’s all I’ve ever wanted,” she says softly, “for you to say that. For you to believe I could be a writer.”
    “You have to believe it.”
    “I do now. You gave me that.”
    She walks back into the room, closer to him. “Daniel, I don’t know how to tell you how much this has—”
    He stands up. He can’t tolerate a long speech of thankfulness. He doesn’t deserve it. “You did the work.”
    “But without you…” She shakes her head at the thought, understanding somehow that she must be quiet, that he can’t accept what she wants to give—her enormous gratitude. But he must.
    She moves closer to him, and they stand less than a foot apart. Silent. Anything might happen now. They both know it. She reaches up and puts her arms around his neck and moves her body to his and lays her head in the curve of his shoulder.

    He’s conscious of the girth of his stomach in contrast to the slender young arms she wraps around him and the lean, eager body he feels along the length of his. He holds her and finds himself doing something he hasn’t thought to do in thirty years: he prays. Then he puts his lips on her bare shoulder and tastes salt from her perspiration and smells something young and floral and utterly mesmerizing—Isabelle.
    She slips the strap of her dress from her left shoulder, her head pressed against his chest as she does, her eyes closed, and he gently, tenderly, carefully allows his lips to travel across the perfect flesh of her collarbone, down to her breast and then her nipple. Her hand goes to the back of his head and time stops, and then he straightens up and so does she.
    He steps back first and they look at each other. He lifts the strap back onto her shoulder. It may be the most selfless gesture he’s made in a decade.
    Carefully, she says what she came to say. “Without you, Daniel, I would have been lost my whole life.”
    And he nods, acknowledging, accepting finally what he has meant to her. Only then can she turn and go.

Part Two
    JUNE 1994 – OCTOBER 2000

CHAPTER FIVE
    T hat summer back in Merrick, Long Island, after graduation felt like a creeping suffocation to Isabelle, a slow slide into death. And the person who was dying was the Isabelle Daniel had nurtured in his own idiosyncratic way from January to May.
    Having made no plans beyond receiving her diploma, Isabelle told herself she would spend the summer, and only the summer, working in her father’s law firm. It would give her some breathing space to figure out her next move.
    But that’s not what happened. As soon as she read the expressions of expectation on her parents’ faces, she turned back into the dutiful daughter she had always been astonishingly quickly. And Daniel’s vision of her as an unique person, ripe with possibility, faded into insubstantiality.
    Maybe they hadn’t had enough time together. Or maybe it had only been the alchemy between them that had allowed her to write freely and, finally, well. In her most fragile moments, Isabelle believed that Daniel may well have conjured that eventually confident girl, who strode into his dingy office in Lathrop Hall eager to get to work, from his own wishing.
    It is a stifling summer in New York, each day blooming hotter than the last, and every morning as Isabelle takes the train into the city with her father and returns home at the end of the workday, she feels Daniel’s Isabelle disappear a tiny bit more into the humid, noxious air.

    At the beginning she held on. That first week, as she and her father settled into seats on the Long Island Railroad, lucky if their car had some degree of air conditioning, Isabelle would take out her laptop and enter Melanie’s world. She would make