Free The Girls of Tonsil Lake by Liz Flaherty Page A

Kennedy did at the inaugural documentary thing that was on TV. I’ll have servants and three houses and a car with a chauffeur who wears a uniform and calls me ma’am. And no one will ever be able to make me do anything I don’t want to. No one.
    The memory rose up unexpectedly, attacking me in the same manner as Mark’s scent had when I opened his closet, but with a very different kind of pain. I’d been ten, and my stepfather, the second of four, had just shown me in graphic detail exactly what he could make me do.
    Mark had always been careful to let me do whatever I wanted. When, as it often happened, I didn’t know what that was, he led me in what always turned out to be the proper direction. When I wanted to go back to work even though I didn’t need the money and he didn’t really want me to work, he had called Liam Gunderson and told him his wife was looking for a job. Could Liam help?
    Now, without Mark, I knew I no longer wanted the brownstone, the house in Miami Beach, the hideous jewels that splattered the counter with jarring colors. Princess Grace and Jackie Kennedy were dead and Queen Elizabeth hardly ever paraded around in jewels anymore.
    I didn’t want to be “ma’am” to a woman who was no less than I was just because I’d loved and married a wealthy man and she had only loved him. For right now, I wanted—no, needed—to go to Maine with my three best friends and just be one of the Tonsil Lake girls.
    “If you’d like,” said Archie, helping me scoop the jewelry back into its bag, “I could drive you to the airport.”
    I met her eyes across the cups and the black bag and the years of our acquaintance. “Thank you, Martha,” I said. “I’d like that.”

Part Two
    “There was no getting around it—she was lost.”
    Jean O’Toole
    The Price of Pride
    Cupid’s Bow Books, 2009

Chapter Five
    Andie
    “Do you have any concerns that we should talk about?”
    Carolyn Murphy, who’s been my gynecologist since our kids were in kindergarten together, never sat behind her desk. She always came around it and sat in a chair beside me. When I’d been too sick to drive myself to see her, she’d dragged a chair from the corner for the person with me rather than sit behind the desk.
    “I’m still tired,” I admitted. “I thought I would have bounced back by now.”
    “Your body’s been attacked from all angles. And, truth to tell”—she shrugged, with a rueful smile—“we ain’t twenty anymore. Your counts are all in good shape, but you’re bouncing back like a fifty-year-old, not a teenager.”
    “Well, it kind of pisses me off.”
    “I hear that. Did you see the new associate in the practice? She’s twenty-nine. Looks like she should still be in elementary school. She’s very good, but I’m having to really work at liking her.” She leaned forward in her chair, pinning me with her gaze. “Are you scared, Andie? That it’ll come back? That we’ve missed something?”
    Deep breath. Another. In. Out. Where are you when I need you to help me breathe, Jean? “Yes.”
    “Good. It’ll keep you vigilant.” She looked down at the notes in her lap. “Maine, huh?”
    “Yes, with Jean and Suzanne and our friend Vin. Maybe you should give me a quadruple prescription for Prozac. I’ll just pass it around when we start fighting.”
    She laughed before an expression of concern crossed her face. “Jean doing all right?” she asked.
    “Sure,” I said, thinking positively. Then I frowned. “Shouldn’t you already know that?”
    “I just haven’t seen her for a while,” she said. “Maybe she’s changed doctors, although no one’s called for her records. At any rate, give her my best when you see her.”
    I did, hissing at her in the hallway of her house so that David wouldn’t hear. “Why aren’t you going to Carolyn for your annual checkup? What did your mother die of, Jean? Do you remember? And who discovered my cancer? It wasn’t me.”
    Jean’s mother had died of