Free Somewhere Between Luck and Trust by Emilie Richards Page A

help herself. She smiled.
    He smiled, too; then he told her where to meet him. In a moment he was gone.
    She got up and stretched, aware she was already looking forward to dinner. If she went home now she would have just enough time to shower and change and maybe close her eyes for a few minutes before it was time to go. She decided to skim the top papers on her desk and put them in her briefcase. After pizza tonight she would sift through them so the rest of the stack wouldn’t be so unmanageable tomorrow.
    She got her briefcase and began to scoop, then she stopped. Under the first pile she saw the bracelet that Edna had admired on Friday afternoon. It was right where her granddaughter had left it, only an avalanche of white had covered it. Sighing, she went to her doorway. Marianne was getting ready to leave for the day.
    “Did a student stop by today looking for a bracelet she left in my office?”
    Marianne shook her head. “Not that I know of.”
    Georgia thought maybe the attendance or instructional secretaries had intercepted the request. If either of them had checked her desk, they wouldn’t have seen it without disturbing her papers, and who would risk doing that?
    “Well, if somebody comes looking tomorrow, I have it,” she said. “We can send it to lost and found if nobody claims it by week’s end.” Lost and found was a jumbled cardboard box in the gym office, and she was hesitant to relegate it there quite yet.
    Georgia went back to her desk and picked up the bracelet to drop it in her drawer for safekeeping. It was, as she’d told her granddaughter, a charm bracelet, and not an inexpensive one. It was heavy with charms—gold, not less expensive sterling silver—and the chain was delicate but sturdy, finely crafted.
    She gazed at the bracelet thinking about the girl who had lost it and how upset she must feel. She tried to remember who had been in her office the day it had appeared, but she was too tired.
    As Edna had said, there were a mixture of charms. Animals. A cat, a horse and something more stylized. She held it closer. The head of a scowling bulldog, but not just any bulldog. This dog wore a familiar cap with the letter G emblazoned on it.
    The mascot of the University of Georgia.
    For a moment she stood perfectly still, then she reminded herself this was simply a student’s bracelet. Perhaps the owner had a boyfriend at UGA, maybe a brother or sister, or perhaps she was simply hoping the university was her destination after high school.
    She opened her drawer to drop it in, but stopped when she noticed an envelope with her name on it right where the bracelet had rested. The envelope must have been under the bracelet all along, or, at least, it might have been. She couldn’t be certain Edna had replaced the bracelet exactly where she had found it.
    Frowning, she opened the envelope and took out several sheets of yellowed newspaper folded four times to fit inside. There was no note, nothing included with them. She carefully unfolded the paper and read the headline of the article on top.
    Sweatshirt Baby’s Life Still Touch-and-Go.
    She stared at the paper a moment, then she refolded it without leafing through the other sheets and carefully placed them inside the envelope again.
    She didn’t have to read the top article to know exactly what it would say. No one knew better than she did. Georgia herself had lived the story.

Chapter Seven
    ON MONDAY AFTERNOON at the Goddess House, rain fell in great silver sheets that washed the porch floor. The rain would have saturated the glider cushions if Cristy hadn’t dragged them inside an hour before when the wind had picked up. A gloomy morning had changed to sullen, and now, in the late afternoon, to hostile. Through the window she could see trees bending under punishing winds. Even though the sun didn’t officially set until sometime after six, there was no sign the sun remembered.
    When it had become clear the storm might be significant, she had